


The Rite Stuff

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Halloween, Humor, M/M, Vampires, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2019-01-27 18:54:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12588380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: All magic is blood magic.  And all vampires are bastards, although in that case, Ed's working from a sample size of one.[Super Halloween-y AU!]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So… this happened mostly because of [Cowania](http://cowania.tumblr.com), who did [this gorgeous-wonderful fanart](http://cowania.tumblr.com/post/166223109177/taking-a-short-break-from-inktober-aint-nobody) that brought the delightfully ridiculous official art to my attention. You can also partly blame it on [Max](http://i-am-the-walruss.tumblr.com), because he's the one who got me started listening to Les Friction, and by now I'm sure you've all noticed that [having a brainstorming/theme song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shCLy3DcPk0) is a lot of what makes the fics go.
> 
> The rest is all me, because it's been a rocky couple of months, and this was fun, so I ran with it. (And did not research. Like, ever. :x Making stuff up as you go along is the ticket.) Because I'm me, I thought I was going to finish with plenty of extra time, and then that was hilarious. Have _barely_ edited, so please forgive me/let me know if anything's typoed or missing! ^^;;

“Where,” Ed says, mostly to himself, “in _eight_ hells is my damn rosemary?  I swear I just saw—”

“It’s hanging over the sink,” Al says without so much as opening his eyes where he’s curled up on the windowsill.  Ed watches him, just to check.

“Why do you know that?” Ed asks, but he doesn’t have much of a choice except to stomp over towards the kitchen in case it’s true.

“Because I know everything,” Al says.

“Shut up,” Ed says.

“You first,” Al says.

The rosemary is hanging over the sink.  Ed manages to suppress a sigh.

“Your ward’s blinking,” Al says.

“Tell ’em to fuck off,” Ed says.  Why did he hang it so unreasonably fucking high up?  Now he’s on his tiptoes, stretching until his right arm makes a crackly sound, in his own damn kitchen.  The _indignity_.

“I think it’s Roy,” Al says.

Ed works his spit around in his mouth so that he doesn’t react right away.  Usually that’s his poker tell; he knows he has to fight it.  “Why would it be Roy?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Al says.  “I know everything, remember?”

Ed makes sure his indistinct but emphatic grumbling is audible as he storms back over to the front door.  The rune above it is, as promised, illuminating itself in blue, fading out, and re-illuminating at regular intervals to indicate that there’s someone coming up the path.

Ed gives Al a half-reprimanding, half-challenging look, which is wholly spoiled by the fact that Al still has his eyes closed.  He’s resting his head on his paws and twitching just the last inch or two of his tail to demonstrate exactly how few fucks he gives about Ed’s determination to doubt his prescience.

Ed goes over to the window and hooks one finger in the edge of the curtain, pulling it back just far enough to peek.

It is Roy.

 _Damn_ it.

Ed opens the door before the bastard can saunter up the rest of the way and do his fancy little rhythmic knock.

“What?” Ed says.

“My dearest Edward,” Roy says, all schmooze and glamor and _stupid_ red silk waistcoat.  It’s like he knew it was Ed’s favorite color and turned it into his trademark on purpose so that Ed would get mesmerized by the little silver buttons all the goddamn time.  “It is an unparalleled delight to see you on this fine evening, too.”

“Get your ass in here before the other mosquitos follow you,” Ed says, but he steps back out of the doorway, because he wasn’t raised in a barn.  Or at least not much.  Mostly in the house part; the barn was just a bonus.  “What’s so fine about it?”

“You,” Roy says, sweeping in.

“Christ,” Ed says, partly just to make him grimace.  “What would you do if I wasn’t here for you to hit on badly every other flippin’ night?”

“Flirt with your brother instead,” Roy says.

“Indescribably flattered,” Al says, still without opening his eyes, and even _Ed_ can’t tell if the undertone is sleepiness or sarcasm.  No one on the planet can sass like Al in Cat Mode.

“You’re awfully freakin’ lucky I barely ever sleep,” Ed mutters for good measure.

“I am,” Roy says—sunnily, which is, incidentally, very fucking funny and all that.

The bastard always puts Ed on edge these days, even though he never does anything… _wrong_ , or anything.  It’s just that Ed doesn’t know what the game is, but he’s still right here, obviously playing it, and that rubs him the wrong way like petting Al’s fur backwards.

He used to think it was a closure thing—or a guilt-trip, or both.  He figured Roy was hanging around all the time because he was trying to make absolutely damn sure that Ed was okay, and/or because he was waiting for Ed to pay him back.

Three years ago, when he and Al had only just barely found their way out here, when the cottage was still half-empty because they didn’t own enough to fill it, Ed hadn’t sussed out the lay—or the ley—of the land yet, and he’d sort of been making it up as he went along.  Al had been scared back then, too, in a different way than he is now—you get acclimated to it, obviously, but at that point, for Al, it was the kind of sharp, stark, intrusive fear that keeps you inside all the time, away from the light, dwelling on the way it knifes through your chest and interrupts your heartbeat at intervals.  The fear’s much older, now.  It’s almost friendly.  And Al’s learned so much about what he’s capable of, and when the guilt of it gets the best of Ed, he shifts into his favorite sleek black kitty shape and rolls his shoulders and says “It’s all right, Brother, I’m not in a hurry.”

Ed is.  But Ed’s been in a hurry since he was three, because by then he knew that life was short and shitty and arbitrary, and he had to do everything that he wanted to as fast as he could before he lost his chance.

He was in a hurry the night he met Roy, which was why his cloak slipped, and his sleeve slipped, and the slow-pulsing glow of his arm showed through.  That was why when he turned a corner, as part of a hasty shortcut through the warehouses near the docks, there were three men standing in the middle of his path.

He hadn’t liked the look of them—enough that he’d known, instantly on instinct, that it would be better to make a break for it than to stick around and find out why.

But turning revealed two more men, blocking his intended egress, and a kid at their head—small, wiry, with shaggy hair and teeth that looked too sharp.

The kid was tossing an apple in one hand, idly, but in perfect time.  Like he really needed you to know he didn’t give a shit.

“You’re new around here, aren’t you?” he asked.

Ed listened to his heartbeat in his ears and tried to scan the corners of his eyes without moving.  Five men total; the kid was a wildcard; he talked like he wasn’t scared of anything, which could either mean that he was used to having bodyguards do the dirty work, or that he’d bathed his own hands in the filth enough times that he simply didn’t care anymore.

“Yeah,” Ed said, slowly.  “S’that a problem?”

Al had called him ‘Captain Obvious’ enough times that he’d given up the tally, but sometimes it was the only way to hold your ground without giving out any information that they didn’t already have.

The kid jerked his chin towards Ed’s arm, and Ed glanced down at it—fuck and double fuck.  The three-inch gap between his sleeve and his glove was more than enough for the thickly-twined black branches along his forearm to show, and the pale gold light was seeping through the cracks—brightening, then fading, then brightening again.  Small blessings or whatever: at least if they assumed that it mimicked the beat of _his_ pulse, they’d think he was calm as a fucking cucumber.  If they didn’t know much about Hearthwood trees, he might have that sliver of intel in reserve, and right about now he’d take anything he could get.

“You’re a witch, aren’t you?” the kid asked.

Ed ran the tip of his tongue along the back of his teeth.  There wasn’t much of a point lying when they could see the evidence themselves—but on the other hand, sometimes stating the facts acted like a catalyst for the confrontation.  People were stupid that way.

He split the difference: “How do you mean?”

The kid grinned without a single iota of humor.  His teeth _were_ sharp; it wasn’t just Ed’s imagination.  The apple rose—fell—slapped its weight into the palm of his hand.

“You know how I fucking mean,” he said.  “What color do you bleed?”

Ed’s heart hammered so hard that he worried—slightly less than rationally, perhaps—that the veins in his temples might betray the answer before he could even muster words.  “What the hell kind of question is that?  Red, like everybody else—what other—”

All magic is blood magic.

But people who wanted the kind he had—

“Funny thing,” the kid said, and he barely even tilted his head, but the men started closing in from every side.  The apple rose—spun in the open air, faintly gleaming— “I don’t believe you.”

“Figures,” Ed said.

The next signaling twist of the kid’s head was much more pronounced, but even without it, Ed would have been waiting.  He knew how to smell a fight by now.

He knew how to win one, too.  But he also knew how to gauge the odds, and this…

This wasn’t what he would have called promising.  Or not for _him_.  Maybe for that creepy-ass kid with his creepy-ass grin and his creepy-ass apple that he kept—

This time, when he caught it, he held on.

“We don’t need all of it,” the kid said.  “Spill some and find out how dark it is.”

“I didn’t _do_ anything,” Ed said, trying for a pleading tone even as he sunk his center of gravity, bending his knees, shifting his weight.  “C’mon, what do you even want?  I’m just—”

“You’re just what we’re looking for,” the kid said, and the men’s shadows had fallen over Ed now; they were all faceless this way, backlit by the distant lanterns hanging on the walls—

Ed hoped that if he didn’t make it out of this, the record would somehow show Al that he’d done everything he could to defuse the whole damn thing.  He really had.  He’d _tried_.

“I’m not—” he started, one more time, purely for the sake of argument.  If he lived through this, Al was going to ask if he’d done everything he could.

And he had.

And one of the kid’s enormous minions was drawing an arm back and curling the associated fist.

Being drastically outnumbered in an unfamiliar location was one thing, but it wasn’t the thing Ed was concerned about.  The concerned part was his own goddamn motherfucking fault, as it happened:

He’d been in a hurry.  He’d taken a shortcut.  He’d gambled that nothing would happen if he took the faster route back from the market—across the docks, not all the way around the lake.

But the docks were built on mud and silt, and the only organisms here were rats and the cats that ate them, and the concrete foundations went ten feet down.  The only thing Ed could reach out to was the water, and the water wouldn’t help him one damn bit.

Even if he could, it would chart as spectacularly stupid—even on the extremely well-plotted graph of his life—to give them the answer they were gunning for in the very process of dodging the bullets.

The best he could hope for was to get away more or less intact.

At least that made it easy, though—having a specific goal in mind, whether or not it was a shit goal that he hated with every fiber of his being and every scrounged-up shred of pride that he had left.  At least that made it simple.

He waited until the first man feigned lunging, stepped back, and then dove in for real—waited until the instant the asshole’s weight shifted forward, and the momentum got the better of him—

And Ed slipped out of the way faster than the shadows that his attackers cast.

The problem with having five adversaries to one you was that there was always another bad guy waiting everywhere you moved—the next one, who’d blocked his exit from the first, leapt forward, trying to hook an arm around Ed—

Who ducked under the bastard’s elbow and swung backwards with his right arm—extending its length to give himself a little more torque as he slammed his hand into that guy’s back to send the asshole stumbling forward; with any luck he’d crash right into the wall—

But there wasn’t time to wait and see if gravity was on Ed’s side, since nothing else was: he had another monstrously huge attacker incoming, this one with a knife.

Drawing his right arm in, across himself, to put its durability between his vulnerable chest and the blade, ate every instant between him turning and him ramming into it.  The sound made the attacker scowl—that much Ed caught a glimpse of as he yanked his arm free of the knife; the gouged space spat tiny shards of bark as he pulled loose.  He warped the fingers this time—longer, slimmer, sharp at the edges.  Two could play at this fucking game, and if it was a bloody one they wanted, that was what they were going to get.

He didn’t want to kill anybody, though.  Even people who were trying to kill _you_ didn’t necessarily deserve to die, and who the fuck were you to decide?  That was up to the Earth and the ether; when people interfered, they got what was coming to them.  And it hurt.

So he slashed instead of stabbing, and the third guy went down howling and clutching at his arm, but with his throat and his jugular and all of the vital pieces still intact.

Diverting three of the initial five left two men on the side the kid had stood on—the kid had moved, but Ed didn’t give a flying fuck where to; the point was that Ed had carved a hole in the wall of aggressors, and nothing else mattered as much as—

Hurling himself through the gap, cloak billowing out behind him, ducking a hand that swiped for his hair—

He scrambled with everything he had in him; almost tipped forward with the force of his own momentum; his boots scraped on the cement, but he’d worn the shit out of their soles for a reason, and they caught traction, and he—

Jerked back as one of the reaching hands seized his cloak and _hauled_ —the clasp dug into his throat so hard and so suddenly that he didn’t have the time or the impulse to drag in a breath before it strangled the one he’d had right out of him—

Whoever had the death grip—not literally, fucking _please_ —on his accoutrements used the handhold to fling him backwards; his feet went out from under him, and he slammed into the cinderblock wall shoulders first.  At least that counted as good news for his skull, which only bounced against it after the initial impact—though that nonetheless mustered bright gold stars and a black mist at the edges of his vision, and it wrung the dregs of the oxygen out of his lungs—

He couldn’t even fucking _move_ but to raise his right arm over his face as the remaining three thugs loomed over him, and the moonlight danced across their knives.  He wanted to say something shitty and clever, but he couldn’t even wheeze a whole breath in just yet, and—

“Interesting,” the kid’s voice said from somewhere past the wall of bodies.  Let this not be the last thing Ed ever saw; let Al not find out in the papers—or never, if they just dumped his body off the docks with bricks roped to him; or if they cut him up in pieces too small for anybody to identify and kept the Hearthwood limbs to sell the lumber— “He’s a disproportionate amount of trouble, isn’t he?”

 _That_ —that Ed could find the breath for, somehow.  It came out faint and reedy, but he said it, and that mattered: “Fuck you.”

“You could cut his tongue out,” the kid said.  “That would solve all of our problems, wouldn’t it?  You know—I really like that.  Do it.”

The assailants he’d felled were dragging themselves upright, but Ed couldn’t worry about them just yet, because one of the remaining ones was maneuvering past his last-ditch defensive slashes with the right arm and pinning it to the wall where he could lengthen it and sharpen it as much as he pleased without damaging a goddamn thing.  A second man had grabbed his left arm, and the third kicked his flailing legs aside and reached in to grip his chin far too fucking tight—

Ed worked his jaw as much as he could despite the vise of dirty fingers, lined up the trajectory to the fucker’s right eye, and spat.

Depending on whose side you took, arguably he deserved to get clocked so hard that the blackness spun in close and thick and intimate.  He wasn’t sure whether to consider himself lucky that it faded out again, giving him a good damn look at the brightness of the knife blade as it moved close—

“Good evening, gentlemen,” a voice like honey and butter and velvet and lamplight said, unless Ed was hallucinating from the concussion… which, on second thought, was _very_ possible.  “I do hope you’re not harassing a helpless citizen.”

All of them looked up at the same instant—at the instant of the first syllable, in perfect sync.  It was… eerie.  Eerier still was the fact that none of them seemed to be able to look away.

The fact that it was affecting the other assholes was eerie, anyway: Ed had gotten mesmerized by men that looked _that_ good once or twice before, but statistically it was very unlikely that that was the reason the others couldn’t stop staring.

“What’s it to you?” one of the men said, very slowly, slurring the words a little—like he was in some kind of a trance.

“Oh, nothing,” the newcomer said, smiling thinly.  His—eyes.  His eyes were like—they were _enveloping_ ; they were so deep and so dark; they had gravity like a hundred-thousand stars despite being the color of the night between— “Just curious.  I’ve been told it’s one of my vices.”

Ed couldn’t stop watching him—like he had some kind of power; like there was some kind of hold—

“It’s a _glamor_ , you fucking idiots,” the kid said, and Ed could almost slide his gaze over far enough to see, just out of the corner of his eye, that the kid had slung an arm across his face.  “Don’t _look_ at him—just don’t listen—”

The newcomer smiled—slow, bright, and broad, so that Ed could see the sharp points of the long, long fangs.

“They say it kills cats, you know,” their owner said, and the purr beneath it still had them all frozen in place like so many statues, struck dumb.  “Curiosity, I mean.  What do you suppose it does to someone who’s already dead?”

“ _Marcus_!” the kid’s voice cut in, edged with a shrillness that almost sounded like panic, and one of the thugs shook himself like a wet dog and blinked repeatedly.

Then he turned to the newcomer with his knife raised.

The newcomer’s smile disappeared, and his shoulders lifted with half a sigh.

Then _Ed_ blinked, and in the time it took—

Either the world blurred, or the creature that had just joined them did—

The man who’d moved screamed, clapping a hand to his neck as the black-mist shadow dematerialized; blood oozed between his fingers and cascaded from under his palm—

The shadow seized the shoulders of the next-closest man, who lifted his blade and half-turned, away from Ed and towards the danger—the darkness solidified into a humanoid shape again just long enough to sink its teeth into his throat—

Blood spurted anew—and the next man howled like a demon had possessed him, slashing wildly at the shifting shadows—

Ed shoved his heavier foot directly at that one’s ankles and sent him down flailing; the knife clattered off onto the pavement somewhere, but he couldn’t track it and the surge of shadows at once.

And the shadows had just felled a third, which only left—

One would-be assailant.  One would-be murderer, or mangler, or cutter-up of the likes of Ed—

Who looked between the shadows, which had swirled into a man’s shape again and sharpened into the smirking mouth and the dancing eyes; and Ed, dragging himself upright and sharpening his forearm into another makeshift blade.

And who then turned tail, and ran.

The kid was gone—Ed couldn’t fathom where to, and couldn’t give a fuck.  One of the men on the ground was still clutching at his throat and twitching violently, and Ed’s stomach turned so hard that his fleshier knee quaked underneath him.

The vampire that had just saved his life and very likely concluded three others was dabbing—mopping, really—at his chin and the edges of his mouth with an honest-to-what-the-fuck-ever white handkerchief.  There was a shape embroidered in black on one of the corners, but Ed couldn’t tell what kind of animal it was, and before he could squint at it stupidly for any longer, the vampire licked his lips, swiftly folded the fabric, and tucked it into a pocket of his dark red waistcoat.

Then he extended one pale, perfect hand.

“I think we should go,” it said.

Ed stared at the hand, which was only marginally better than staring at the eyes.  “‘ _We_ ’?”

“I know all of the quickest ways out of here,” the vampire said, cheerfully.

Ed chanced a glance upward, and the eyes didn’t drag him in the same way this time.  Everything felt—firmer.  Less breathless; the floaty, dizzy, compulsive strangeness of staring at the vampire had faded.  Looking was voluntary now.

“Come on,” the vampire said.  “I’ll buy you a drink.”

“No,” Ed said.

A smirk bloomed across the bastard’s face, and to say that it was devastating was overselling natural disasters.  “To the coming along, or to the drink?”

Ed set his jaw, swallowed, and weighed his options as quickly as he could.  Contributing anything further to this conversation would put him at a disadvantage—this new monster had probably just killed three men that otherwise might have killed _him_ , sure, but that didn’t exactly make the vampire safer than they’d been.  If anything, he was confirmed to be worse, and—

And the playful tone of his voice sent little ripples of something simultaneously warm and cold up and down Ed’s spine, and he didn’t _like_ it.

Besides which—there was the matter of the several groaning bodies on the ground.  Whatever happened, Ed couldn’t really afford to stick around, so at least that made his mind up about that.

He hauled his sleeve down, retracted all of the altered parts of his right arm, hitched his cloak higher over his shoulders, and started off swiftly and resolutely the way he’d been walking before any of this had begun.

“It doesn’t have to be alcoholic,” the vampire said, striding smoothly beside him with an alacrity that was, for the record, _maddening_.  “You just look like you could use one—not that I blame you.  Cocoa?  Cider?  Something warm, I thi—”

Ed did not slow down; he did not look away from the path ahead of him.  “Why did you do that?”

The smirk was back; he could hear it.  That was even worse than the incongruous delight.  “Save your wonderful ass, do you mean?”

“Or whatever,” Ed said.

“Truthfully,” the vampire said, “because I can’t stand bullies.  And because you’re very cute.  And because we freaks and frightmares have to look after one another; goodness knows no one else will.”  His tone brightened again.  “And because we’re neighbors, after all.”

That made Ed stop so fast—mid-stride, no less—that he almost bowled himself over like a fucking idiot and smashed his face into the concrete after all of that effort to preserve it from harm.

“We’re _what_?” he said.

The vampire looked positively tickled.  Ed hated him.

“You just moved in to that little cottage with all the garden space, didn’t you?” the bastard asked.  “I’m right down at the end of the road.”

Ed was staring at him again, the risks of it be damned.

“It’s a bit big for one,” the vampire went on, completely undaunted, “but it’s a very nice property.  Yours is, too, of course—bit of a fixer-upper, but it’s _darling_ , and I love what you’ve done with the plants already.  It looks so alive.”

Ed scrounged around in his brain for some words to speak, but he couldn’t…

The house at the end was a mansion.  There were horses sometimes.  Ed was pretty sure he’d seen servants.  It wasn’t as big as some of the estates further out in the hills, or anything, and it didn’t have any turrets, but it was huge, and white, and fine, with pillars and a sprawling lawn and a huge wrought-iron gate with a stylized _RM_ laid out in the front in gold.  He and Al had joked about how whoever lived there must be…

Well, they’d joked about how whoever lived there had to be a posh, arrogant recluse, and that didn’t exactly seem to be wrong.

The vampire raised his eyebrows, and the smirk widened until a tiny sliver of ivory showed.  “If you’d rather,” the vampire said, “you could come over for a drink instead.”

Ed swallowed.  He took a breath.  And he decided that it would be better to die stubborn than to placate this… whoever, whatever he was.

“I just want to go home,” he said.

His voice didn’t shake.  Given that he was, more or less, staring death in the face here, he felt like that was worth commending, even if it did go a little faint on him towards the end of the sentence, just to make sure he couldn’t celebrate too much.

And the vampire—

Smiled.  Thinly.

“That is eminently reasonable,” he said.

Ed watched him for a second, trying to parse the lines and angles of his expression, and then gambled again.

“Is it the vampire thing that makes you talk like that?” he asked.  “Or is that just you?”

For a split-second, he could see the points of the teeth again as the vampire started to grin and then suppressed it.

“That’s just me.”  One of the pale hands extended into the careful space between them again.  “Forgive me—where are my manners?  Roy Mustang; pleasure’s all mine.”

He’d held out the left hand.  Ed’s stomach did another somersault-like thing, so swiftly that he couldn’t figure out what the feelings underneath it were.

If this creature had wanted him dead, it would have had its work cut out for it a couple of minutes ago.  And if it changed its mind about that, and it really did live down at the end of the same damn street, it wasn’t like knowing Ed’s name was going to make any damn difference.

Ed shook.  “Ed.  Elric.”  It wasn’t like anything sh— _less_ than his whole name could do any damage, anyway, and as far as the registers were concerned, he and Al didn’t exist.

“Charmed,” Roy said, which was really not funny at all, as he squeezed Ed’s hand tight and then let go.  “May I walk back with you?”

“I don’t figure I can stop you,” Ed said, and he started striding forward again for good measure, and Roy followed.

“No?” Roy asked, mildly, as they turned another corner.  “I imagine that once you’re in your element, you must be very formidable.”

“You’ve got a big imagination,” Ed muttered.

“Sometimes the world seems very small,” Roy said.  “And at those times, I’ll use any weapons at hand to expand it.”

Ed glanced at him.

Roy smiled again—the same light, narrow, almost-mocking little smile, with both eyebrows arched and his eyes alight with something quite like mischief.

“You’re weird,” Ed said.

“A high compliment,” Roy said.  “One I’ll treasure until the end of my days.”

“Aren’t you going to live forever?” Ed asked.

There it was again.  “That’s the theory,” Roy said, idly.  “But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that theories have their limits, and the universe doesn’t always like to play by the rules.”

Ed eyed him a little harder.

“So,” Roy said, brightly, as they finally stepped free of the horrible fucking labyrinth of warehouses and back onto solid ground, and Ed’s entire being breathed a sigh of relief.  “How are you enjoying our humble village so far?”

“Fuck you,” Ed said before he could stop himself.

Roy—laughed.  And he laughed even better than he smiled, and Ed _hated_ him—so much; so very, very much—

So much that he caught himself snickering too.

  


* * *

  


Mustang strolled alongside him all the way to the cutesy little front gate—which would never have impeded anyone who was actually serious about entering the yard—at the end of the path up to the cottage where Al would be waiting, possibly napping, likely not even worried yet.

Mustang’s far-too-clever eyes did not miss the warm yellow light seeping out through the gap between the curtains in the front window.

“What color _do_ you bleed?” he asked.  “If that’s not too personal.  I understand that for witches it depends.  Or are you a druid?”

Ed tried to assess the balance of the scale of his crap choices for what felt like the billionth time tonight.  He owed this bastard something, and despising the debt so deeply that it resonated in his chest wouldn’t change a thing.

“My father was,” he said.  “Or is.  Or whatever.  I don’t give a fuck.  We—I mean, I—I’m—sort of in between.”

The worst part was, he couldn’t even blame it on the glamor; he had a well-documented tendency to say stupid shit when there was an attractive man up in his face.

Tonight’s specimen gave him that same terrible little smile.  “Ah,” he said.  He’d noticed that Ed hadn’t answered the question; it was painfully obvious that he was too damn smart by half.  “Makes sense.  Well—I hope you have a much more palatable remainder of your night, hm?”

“Thanks,” Ed said, very slowly, because that sounded an awful lot like being set loose without having to pay the toll.  “You, too.”

  


* * *

  


Mustang waved in a sanguine sort of way and then turned smoothly, strode smoother still, and disappeared almost immediately into the night.

Ed told Al the whole story the next morning while he was standing on a ladder, painting the finishing-touch rune for the ward over the door.  The answer to Mustang’s question would have been flagrantly evident if he’d been here: _darker than an ordinary human, but a hell of a lot lighter than you_.

“They _wanted_ tainted blood?” Al asked, and his ears were twitching in a way that would have been obnoxiously cute if it hadn’t meant that he was anxious.

“By the sound ’f it,” Ed said, sucking on his fingertip to try to stop the bleeding before he smeared his own work everywhere.  “Dunno for sure.”

“Fantastic,” Al said, so sarcastically that it was a miracle the acid hadn’t materialized and worn a hole through their floor.  “I’m sure it’s fine: tainted blood magic is always for good things, after all.  They’re probably throwing a nationwide picnic.”

“They might not’ve been planning to _do_ anything with it,” Ed said.  “They never said anything like that—just that they wanted to find out.  Could’ve been an extermination thing.”

“Oh, good,” Al said.  “Maybe they’re only trying to kill us.  That makes me feel so much better.”

“Do you have a single not-sassy bone in your body?” Ed asked.

“Do you have a single self-preservation instinct?” Al asked.

“ _Jeez_ ,” Ed said.

“I mean it,” Al said, more softly.  “Just—sometimes—it’s better to be late and alive, Brother.  It really, really is.”

Ed examined the little nick in his fingertip closely so that he wouldn’t have to meet the intensely earnest kitty eyes.  “I know.  I _know_.  I just—”

“Wish we could be safe somewhere?” Al asked.  “Anywhere?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “That.”  He checked the edges of the ward rune.  “This should help.”

“‘Should’ is my favorite word in matters of life and death,” Al said.

Ed wanted to laugh, but he ended up grimacing.  “Me, too.”

  


* * *

  


The next night, shortly after sundown, while Ed was in the kitchen sorting out which of the only-slightly magically-modified produce would sell best at the market, Al called “Brother?” from the front room, and the second syllable wobbled a bit.

Ed dropped everything and flung himself through the doorway, halfway across the rug—

The rune had lit up lightning blue.

Ed breathed.  He knew he was breathing, because he could see his chest rising; because he could hear the sound of air rasping in and out of him over the frantic tattoo of his heartbeat.

He swallowed hard, squared his shoulders, and crossed to the window as fast as he could without giving in to the impulse to run—pulled the curtains just far enough aside to peer past them, and—

“What the fuck,” he said.

It wasn’t a question, because questions prompted explanations, and there was no possible fucking explanation for Roy Mustang sauntering up their front walk bearing a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of wine.

He stepped back from the window, blinked, stepped over to the door, flung it open, and tried again: “What the _fuck_.”

“Not the most favorable greeting I’ve ever received,” Roy said, beaming for just a half a second before he buried it in smirk again, “but far from the worst.”

Ed made a face that hopefully conveyed exactly how he felt about this entire situation and that pathetic excuse for a quip in particular.

“What do you want?” he asked.

Al hissed “ _Brother_ ,” which Ed pointedly ignored, because that was the primary perk of being the older sibling most of the time.

“Only to see that you were all right,” Roy said.  He held out the flowers.  “I never brought a housewarming gift when you moved in.”  He held out the wine.  “And the offer of a drink still stands.”

“I don’t need a drink,” Ed said, because that sounded worlds better than _I don’t want a drink with_ you _, because I can’t hold my liquor, and I’ll probably tell you how excruciatingly easy on the eyes you are_.  He stepped back out of the doorway, though, because Al was going to kill him in another minute, and death by kitty claws sounded very painful and rather slow.  “Well?” he said after a second of being out of the way yielded nothing but a strange facial expression from Roy.  “What are you waiting for?”

This smile was different—most of them were thin, but this one was tight, and there wasn’t the same amusement in it.

“An invitation, I’m afraid,” Roy said.  “I can’t enter a dwelling without being invited.”

“Every time?” Ed asked.  “Or just the once?”

“Every time,” Roy said, and the smile was—gone, now, and his eyes had gone from regular-dark to weird-dark, and Ed… didn’t like it.

“So if I’m ever pissed at you,” Ed said, slowly, “I can just leave you outside in the rain?”

They were now a slightly-scandalized dark, but also surprised enough that they no longer looked weird.

“I… suppose,” Roy said.  “Although I would hope—”

“C’mon in,” Ed said.

“Brother, you are the _worst_ ,” Al said.

Roy froze with one foot on either side of the threshold and turned to stare at the talking cat.

“Oh,” Ed said.  “Um… Al, meet… Roy Mustang.”

Roy’s face transitioned seamlessly from shock to suavity, the absolute bastard.  “That actually explains a lot,” he said.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Al.”

“I can’t believe you want to leave him out in the rain,” Al said.

Ed stomped, loudly, back into the kitchen to start collecting all of the vegetables that had ended up on the floor.  “Whose side are you on?”

“Mine,” Al said.

“Lovely place you’ve got here,” Roy said, and his voice was getting closer.  “Where may I leave—these?”

Ed straightened up from where he’d been bent double gathering carrots from their tiles.  He’d have to deal with the dirt later.  “Uh… I dunno.  Make yourself at home or whatever.”

“Thank you,” Roy said.

And that was exactly what he did.

  


* * *

  


At first, Ed was waiting for him to ask for something—not that Ed knew what, but he wasn’t anticipating anything good.  Roy had saved his sorry ass from death or something damn close to it: there was a debt to be paid.  Weren’t vampires supposed to be counters of things?  That had to include points, tallies, what one being owed another.  Roy had to be thinking about it.  There had to be something that he wanted in return.

Ed figured it wasn’t just hospitality—where he and Al were from, though, that was a requirement anyway, so they extended it to Roy as best they could given that they weren’t exactly magnificent at taking care of themselves.  They were getting by, though—the market loved the ever-so-subtly-enhanced food that grew so reliably around their humble abode, aided by some water, some light, some love, a few drops of Ed’s blood, and an incantation or two.  The profits kept them afloat, and there was enough to spare to jaunt off to the city periodically and spend a few days holed up in the big libraries, searching for clues about how to bring Al back to his proper form.

Roy just kept on… visiting, though.  He’d come by, and try to charm the fuck out of them, and Ed would tell him where to shove it, and he’d sprawl out in one of the armchairs and offer conversation or commentary until Ed showed signs of sleepiness.  Al even got into the habit of curling up in his lap, and Roy would scratch behind his ears until the purring got to be deafening, and Ed experienced the supremely surreal feeling of not knowing who to be jealous of and not _wanting_ to be jealous of either.

Al still does that.  Ed suspects it’s on purpose now, because he knows that it makes Ed uncomfortable in a way that he doesn’t really know how to describe.

But Roy’s never once asked him for anything.  That’s the weirdest thing.  That’s the part that keeps him up some nights, wondering if…

Just—wondering.

Once he’d accepted that Roy didn’t seem to be waiting for him to offer anything in return for the original kindness, Ed used to hazard that it might be a predator thing—the way Roy looks at him from across the room sometimes, when he thinks Ed’s too engrossed in reading to notice his attention.  Roy’s pretty justified thinking that, for the record, given how damn long it took Ed to realize that there was any attention being given out at all; for a long time he’d just assumed that Roy just got bored of being all alone in that big-ass house, or appreciated their squishy couches, or _really_ liked petting cats, and he’d more or less ignored Roy’s presence in the living room altogether.

But it’s not—is it?  It’s not a hunger thing.  Or at least not in the way Ed would have guessed.

It’s scarier this way, honestly.  Predators Ed can handle; he’s been to hell and back, fairly literally; he’s been roughed up and counted out more times than he can number anymore, and every time he’s come back fighting.  He’s used to being an underdog; he’s used to wriggling free; he’s used to proving himself and then moving on.

But this—

Because if it’s not his blood Roy’s thinking of, when those too-dark eyes follow the movement of his fingers against the cover of the book, track the way their tips slide between the corners of the pages—

If it’s not his veins Roy’s looking for, when he sets that stupid fucking smoldering gaze on the hollow of Ed’s collarbones every time the neck of his shirt slips open—

If it’s not a meal Roy wants from him—

Then Ed’s in so much fucking deeper than he thought.

It’s easy, if it’s just—him.  If it’s just his stupid little fantasies in a stupid little void.  If it’s just lying in bed trying to suffocate himself with his own pillow so that at least he won’t have to keep thinking about the way the lowest note of Roy’s laugh resonates in the pit of his stomach and spawns tiny bats and butterflies every single time.

If it’s just him, he can hide it, and smother it, and try again and again and again to kill it until he finally fucking wins someday, and no one will ever have to know.

If it’s just him, it never has to start, which means that he can’t ever fuck it up.

If it’s just him, he never has to try to nurture something that he knows full well will only ever defy him—will only ever blossom into a bitter, bitter disappointment.  Rot and thorns.  And… aphids.  Little snappy-mouthed motherfuckers streaming up his hand.

If it’s just him, it’s safe to dream about it being something better than it would be if it was _both_ of them.

But if that’s what Roy’s really watching for—

Well—he’ll just—not show it.  Roy doesn’t ever have to know.  It’ll be a hell of a lot easier for everybody in the long run; Ed can’t afford another distraction anyway.  He might be making some headway into sorting out Al’s corporeal dysfunction with some alterations to one of the spells he found in that book he bought the last time they were in the city (Al hates being a snake, because “they don’t even have _paws_ , Brother, and paws are the best part of _life_ ,” but he hates even more not getting to sneak into the library wrapped around Ed’s torso), and—

“You’re thinking so loud it’s a wonder your skull doesn’t shatter,” Roy says, and Ed categorically does not startle a little bit where they’re standing at the kitchen counter chopping things.  “The sheer force of the soundwaves, let alone the thoughts themselves—”

“Har, har,” Ed says, ducking so that his hair will slide in front of his face a little, because he can feel his cheeks heating up.  “More cutting vegetables, less cutting commentary.”

The good news is that Roy tends to find it amusing to follow half of his instructions.  The bad news is that nobody handles celery as sensually as Roy Mustang, which is twice as bizarre given that he can’t even _eat_ it.  He says he still likes the way that food smells, and it’s just that it doesn’t actually register with his body or satisfy him at all, but he misses cooking and certainly doesn’t mind helping—

But what if this is _another_ piece of evidence that—

Shit.  Can’t think it.  Can’t go there; can’t even visit; can’t even peek through the window, or the whole place is gonna come down around Ed’s ears before he knows what hit him.

“Everything all right?” Roy asks.

“Yeah,” Ed says, and then of course his right arm chooses that moment to act up—a little spark of phantom pain spirals downward and outward from his wrist, making sure to visit every single finger, and he tries to shake it to make the needling feeling fade out faster.  “It’s just been a little weird lately, ’s’all.”

Roy sets his knife down on the cutting board, leans against the counter, and asks, “Weird how?”

Like it matters.  Like he cares.  Like there’s anything he could do about it if Ed had some kind of an answer—if Ed had anything to say that wasn’t _Weird kind of like it was the night I met you; weird kind of like it was the night before we tried to bring her back.  Weird like something bad is going to happen_.

“I dunno,” he says instead, extending and retracting the edges on the fingers.  Maybe Roy will get the hint; maybe they can go back to cutting vegetables and pretend he never said anything, and he won’t have to think about what might go wrong—about everything he still has left to lose.

“That’s probably not helping,” Roy says of the blade-hand calisthenics, and Ed glares at him, but then Roy’s lifting up his hand and grazing his fingertip so feather-lightly across Ed’s cheek, pushing his hair back— “What happened here?”

Ed’s heart has taken up pounding so hard that the task of parsing human speech just tripled in complexity.  Roy’s hands are always, always cold, but there’s something weirdly sort of nice about it.  Almost… soothing.  “What happened where?”

“You have a cut just here,” Roy says, and most of his fingers stay tangled in Ed’s hair, but one sweeps back and ghosts along a little arc that does, when Ed is hypersensitive and piqued and frozen in place with all of his nerve endings on fire, feel a bit different than the rest of his skin.  “Please tell me you don’t shave with those.”

“I’ll shave with whatever the fuck I want,” Ed says, and it sounds like the words come from another person in another universe who is not bound and suspended by the curve of Roy’s hand against his cheek; who is not staring into Roy’s eyes and fathoming that they must simply go on _forever_ — “I think… the berries kinda fought back earlier.  Prob’ly that’s it.”

“Ah,” Roy says softly.  “How terribly ungrateful, after all you’ve done for them.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, hardly any louder.  He’s not completely sure either of them is breathing.  “Little shits.”

“Still,” Roy says, barely audible, and two fingertips draw slowly around the curve of Ed’s ear, and it’s all he can do to set his jaw in time to contain the shiver— “Shouldn’t be cavalier about that sort of thing—your hand, I mean.  It could be a symptom of something bigger.”

Roy’s mouth has the most exquisitely beautiful shape of any that Ed has ever seen.  It’s just—balanced.  Perfectly balanced.  With this incredibly sharp, delicate dip in the top lip and just the right amount of curve to it, and—

And it occurs to Ed that he could not possibly recognize these things if he was not staring openly and intently at Roy’s mouth.

“Uh,” he chokes out.  He’s still staring.  His eyes are broken; they won’t move.  “Y-yeah.  Guess.”

“Mm,” Roy says, which makes everything a billion times fucking worse; Ed can see the way it resonates in his throat— “When’s the next time Winry’s coming by?”

Winry.  Thank fucking… someone.  Thank the planet; thank the Earth; thank the soil and the air and the electricity that boils between them.

Winry is good—good in general, and good to be thinking about at a time like this.  Winry would eviscerate him with a spoon if she knew that he was thinking, in great detail, about making out with Roy.  Not that she knows who Roy is, but—conceptually—

“Um,” Ed says.  The problem is that despite very nearly being able to feel the steely progress of a spoon marking out its intended trajectory on his stomach, he can very _definitely_ still feel Roy’s fingers curled around his ear, settled just behind the hinge of his jaw.  Roy must be able to mark his pulse beating frantically in the vein—is that the vampire equivalent of smelling someone cooking bacon?  “I… guess… probably soon.  She… hates winter up here.  Thinks it’s too cold.”

“Mm,” Roy says again, because he is a merciless fucking bastard and apparently wants Ed to pass out and/or die on the spot.  “It does get a bit chilly, if one is sensitive to such things.”

They’d had an incredibly fascinating—albeit slightly intoxicated—conversation one night a while back about how vampires are more or less cold-blooded.  Or cold-ichored, since the ink-black liquid that runs through Roy and others like him falls into a separate category altogether.

Ed wishes, though, that Roy hadn’t just used the word ‘sensitive’.  It’s very descriptive, after all.  Very evocative.  And very accurate.  If Ed’s nerves were the plates on a xylophone, or the keys on a piano, or a set of strings—

Well, it’d be a cacophony, but you’d damn well _hear_ it.

“Um,” Ed says, yet again, every bit as brilliantly as all the times before.  He hates the way Roy’s touch makes his brain fizzle—almost as much as he loves the way it makes his flesh tingle like there’s static underneath his skin.  “Kinda.  Yeah.”

He tries to funnel the impulse to shake like a leaf out through his extremities—if just his hands tremble, only slightly where they’re still laid out on the cutting board, maybe Roy won’t notice.  The bastard would pick up on a full-bodied shudder before Ed would even have time to tell him that it wasn’t really a bad thing, so—

“I suppose cold is just an opportunity, though,” Roy is saying, and his fingertips drift _so_ slowly down the side of Ed’s neck,  “to find better ways to stay wa—”

The part of Ed that deals in instinct—the part that keeps his ass alive; the part that sees the way the pieces of the world shift around each other before they settle, and dives into the gaps—knows before he feels the first spear of pain.

The rest of him releases a faint yelp-gasp abomination and looks stupidly down at where he just cut his left index finger open with the edges of the one on the right.

“Aw, fuck,” he manages, which at least has a word in it—and most of him’s too preoccupied to mourn the growing space between them as Roy steps back, and Ed stretches across the counter to reach for the dishtowel to wrap it around his streaming finger—

And it takes him an embarrassingly long five seconds of scowling down at the reddening terrycloth, thinking about what a pain in the ass it’s going to be to magic this out later on, before he realizes why Roy’s moved so far and gone so quiet.

His heart’s getting a goddamn workout today: racing and thudding and tripping over itself, back and forth and up and down; now it’s banging against the back of his sternum at the way Roy’s eyes are fixed immovably on the towel around his hand.

“Shit,” Ed hears his idiot voice say.  “I—sorry, I—”

“Don’t be absurd,” Roy says, and it sounds strained for a second, but then the stillness of his face cracks into an approximation of a smile, and then he shadow-shifts out through the doorway, collides with something in the hall, says “ _Ow_ ,” and returns with the first-aid kit from their bathroom.  “Put it under the tap,” he says.  “Did you get carrot in it?”

“Of course I didn’t get _carrot_ in it,” Ed says.  Then he pauses, and then he peeks.  “Or… not… much.”

He doesn’t give Roy an assessing glance before he peels the towel off his finger and shoves his hand underneath the faucet and struggles to turn the ornery hot water handle with the one that isn’t bleeding.  He doesn’t look, because he doesn’t have to check; he trusts Roy; he _does—_

He managed to nick himself pretty deep, because of course he fucking did.  He tries to pinch it shut once he’s rinsed off the worst of the blood—and the carrot—and only then lets himself glance towards Roy, as though he hasn’t been itching to the entire time he’s been tussling with the stupid sink.

Roy has a clean new towel draped over the palm of one hand and a length of gauze trailing from the other.  Ed doesn’t know how he accomplished that with only the two hands to work with.  Maybe that’s some sort of subsidiary vampire power.

“Thanks,” Ed says, though that might be a little premature when he’s still clutching his finger to try to prevent it from bleeding ever again, because that fucking gleam in Roy’s fucking eyes—the way every centimeter of his face went stiller than statuary and smoother than glass—

It did something in Ed’s guts.  He can’t tell if it was fear or something else that dressed up like it, but he sure as hell knows he doesn’t want to tangle with it again.

Roy reaches out—reaches out to the length of his arms, keeping the greatest possible physical distance between them; and he has to know that Ed notices, but by his neutral expression you wouldn’t think he has a care in all the vastness of the world—and pats the water off of all of the exposed parts of Ed’s left hand.  Then he gently turns it over, which involves cupping it in his—which Ed completely forgot to calculate for, because evidently some part of him really does want to _die_ tonight—and pries the Hearthwood fingers away, and dives in with the gauze before the gash has time to start welling in earnest again.

Roy does an extremely deft and gentle and efficient job of wrapping Ed’s finger up tight, which adds up to a combination of adjectives that really shouldn’t go uncelebrated.  But he keeps swallowing, and there’s a little line between his eyebrows, which means he’s thinking about something that he wants to say.

Words never elude Roy: he’s got too damn many of them; if you cut _him_ with a knife-finger, he’d probably bleed dictionaries’ worth.

He ties off the bandage, but then he… doesn’t let go of Ed’s hand.  Just… holds onto it—but lightly, gently, so that Ed could pull it free from where both of Roy’s are cradling it, if he wanted to.

He doesn’t.  Which is the scary part.  Roy’s palms and his fingers are cool, but they’re careful, and he likes the way Roy’s skin slides over his as Roy squeezes just once—

“I’m trying to find a graceful way to say this,” Roy says.

Ed doesn’t know what ‘this’ is, and his pulse is beating in his brain so hard that it seems to have kicked the shit out of any complex thoughts he might once have harbored there.  “Eh.  Graceful’s overrated.”

“Fair,” Roy says.  He squeezes again, and smiles a little, and raises an eyebrow— “Edward,” he says, “whatever I am, whatever happens—you are not food.”

Ed’s tired, tormented, overstimulated psyche makes an immense and heartfelt and genuine effort to contain the immediate impulse to laugh.  It really, really does.  The rest of him bites down hard on the tip of his tongue to try to assist it in its noble endeavor to stay calm and mature or whatever shit.

A snicker slips out anyway.

Roy sighs, loud and feelingly, because apparently even dying can’t dull one’s knack for melodrama.  Unfortunately, he also releases Ed’s hand, which… Ed’s just not going to spend much time thinking about the fact that losing that contact registers at all, let alone as a pity.  “This is precisely why graceful is _not_ overrated, you little cretin.”

“Fuck you,” Ed says, but he can’t make it sound anything but cheerful.  “I’m the biggest cretin you’ve ever fuckin’ seen.”

Roy looks at him, meaningfully, and raises an eyebrow.  “We can go with that if you prefer.”

“See?” Ed says.  “Now you’re talking sense again.”

Roy’s eyes narrow—and then they do that _thing_ again.  The thing with the darkness and the glimmer and the slowly-curling smirk.

“One of these days, Edward,” Roy says, and it’s not the glamor voice, but it’s so damn close; it’s silkier, and twice as fucking potent— “I’m going to shut you up good.”

The tension in the room just changed so violently that it feels like whiplash—the air practically hums; Ed’s skin tingles with it.

“Oh, yeah?” he says, and probably it sounds stupid, but it’s about the best he can do with his mouth instantaneously going dry.  “How do you figure you’re gonna do that?”

Sometimes it’s a shame that challenging authority is his default reaction.

Sometimes it’s fucking great.

Roy’s hand rises; his fingertips graze down along Ed’s jaw again; he leans in close enough that he doesn’t have to speak, only _breathe_ against Ed’s skin— “I have a few ideas.  All of them would have to be examined rather thoroughly.”

Ed may still be alive, but he’s not positive.  Do vampires have that effect on everyone, or just people they’re…

…seducing.  That’s what—is that what this is?  Holy shit—

Ed swallows, hard, and tries to wet his lips, but that just makes Roy’s eyes flick to them, and that—

“What makes you so sure any of ’em are gonna work?” he forces out.

Roy’s fingertips trail down his throat, dappling over his skin, sending ripples through him _everywhere_ , and settle on top of his collarbone, and just— _sit_ there, somehow radiating even though they don’t generate any heat—

“I’ve got a good feeling,” he says.

Ed’s counting Roy’s eyelashes, cataloguing the tiny grooves on his lips—mesmerized by the way they shift as he starts to smirk again, the _bastard_ —

“You talk an awfully big fuckin’ game,” Ed says.  They’re breathing the same damn air; there can’t be more than three square centimeters of it now; he can _feel_ Roy’s body cooling it; their noses would’ve brushed by now if Roy hadn’t tilted his head.  “How’m I supposed t—”

Something shatters in the living room.

Ed can’t quite tell by the noise alone whether that particular combination of sounds heralds ceramic or glass, and he doesn’t give a shit; he’s flung himself over the threshold into the room at a run before he’s really had time to wonder.

Al perches primly on one of their little twined-branch-built end tables, one paw extended.  He lowers it and tucks it next to the other, curling his tail around both of them, as if that will erase the innumerable shards of a vase scattered all over the floor.

“What,” Ed says, “the _hell_ , Al?”

“Sorry,” Al says, sounding so distinctly un-sorry that Ed’s head spins a little bit trying to wrap itself around the irony.  There’s something else in it, too—something… frigid.  “Instincts, you know.  Cat problems.  See something minding its own business; suddenly feel compelled to destroy it.”

“Uh,” Ed says.  “Why?”

Al cat-shrugs.

Then he fixes his yellow eyes on Roy, who has moved to stand just behind Ed’s right shoulder—silently, but Ed has a weird sense of Roy’s physical presence these days, which is another thing he doesn’t like to dwell on.

“Not sure,” Al says.  “Sometimes these things just happen.”

“Ah,” Roy says, softly but with a strange note of finality that makes Ed turn and look at him.  “I… think perhaps I should—go.”

“What?” Ed says.  Sometimes he wishes he had more than one head, or at least an extra pair of eyes; it’s impossible to monitor Al and Roy at once, and he’s still preoccupied with the remains of the ex-vase that have distributed themselves across the floorboards.  With his luck, he’s going to end up with a thick shard embedded in the sole of his solitary vulnerable foot on the same night that he sliced himself open with his own hand, isn’t he?

“Perhaps,” Al says, apparently in answer to Roy’s question, which illuminates a grand total of jackshit.  “We’ll see you again soon, though?”

“I hope,” Roy says.  Ed turns to scowl at him, which he should understand by now is a wordless _What the fuck_ , in time to see him hesitate, plaster on a smile, and reach out to clap Ed’s left shoulder in a bewilderingly impersonal sort of way.  “Goodnight, Edward.”

“Goodnight,” Ed says.  “Why are you like this?”

Roy flashes an uncharacteristically unconvincing grin, and the glimpse of teeth makes Ed’s skin prickle.  “Just lucky, I guess.”

“‘Lucky’ is close to the word I would’ve picked,” Ed says.

Roy mock-bows—because bastard; that word starts to sound tired inside Ed’s head some nights—and then makes his merry way to the door and out through it before Ed can come up with a clever response to that.

He would have, though.  Definitely.  Given another five or six seconds.  No doubt about it.

But once the door shuts behind Roy’s maddeningly easy-to-admire ass, Ed’s brain loosens up and starts to process other inputs, and then the gears are grinding—maybe that’s… not the best word to use right now—and he’s back in business.

“Al,” he says, slowly, turning to the particularly evil feline face of his already fairly evil brother, “what the hell was all of that about?”

He’s always found it remarkable how much human emotion Al can convey with cat features.

“Brother,” Al says, “I know it’s Roy.  And I know he’s your type.”

“What?” Ed says.  Fortunately, the staunch stone wall of his denial can withstand an immense blast of white-hot panic.  It’s held up through worse. “I don’t have a type.  And if I did, he wouldn’t be it.  And—”

“The point is,” Al says, completely undaunted, “he’s still a vampire.”

Ed stares at him.  “…duh?”

“You can’t date a vampire,” Al says.

Ed stares harder.  It doesn’t help.  Nothing is going to help.  This is it: his brain’s going to explode.  It’s the end.  He had a pretty good run.

“I’m not dating him,” Ed says.  He barrels on to the next thought as fast as he can—before he has time to reflect on the way that the simple act of uttering those words made something molten curl up tight in the pit of his stomach.  “And even if I—was, you are the _last_ person I’d expect to be racist about it.”

Al appears to be regretting the fact that cats can’t physically execute the maneuver known as the facepalm.  That used to be one of his trademarks when it came to conversations like this.

“Brother,” he says, “vampirism is not a race.  It’s a condition.  And it’s communicable.  And I adore Roy—you know I do—but this isn’t about Roy. This is about the food chain.”

“I can’t believe this,” Ed says, faintly, because at this point he’s so damn stupefied that he’s just speaking all the thoughts without reviewing them first.  “What the fuck is going on?  Is it the water?  That is the _second_ time somebody’s referred to me being food in one night, and I only talk to two people.”

“Perhaps that’s a sign that you should pay attention,” Al says.

“To you telling me Roy’s too dangerous to get close to?” Ed asks.  “Kinda too fuckin’ late, given he hangs out in our house all the damn time, and brings you those little tuna flakes that turn you into a slavering ragdoll—”

“They’re delicious,” Al says.  “And that’s not what I said.  I just—there are—the boundaries get—they change when you—”

“He’s not going to fucking _eat_ me,” Ed says.

“How do you know?” Al asks.  “It’s easier for him at a safe distance, but—” One paw gestures towards Ed’s hand in a way that is so unmistakably human that it’s sort of surreal.  “He almost took a bite out of you tonight, didn’t he?  And that wasn’t even a whole heck of a lot of blood—what if it was more?  What if he was closer to you at the time?  What if he was used to having access to some of your other bodily fluids, and—”

“Nope,” Ed says, weakly.  “We are not talking about that, now or ever or—ever.  Not over my dead fucking body.  Not doing it.  Not—”

“We have to be careful,” Al says.  “There’s—so much to lose, and if—I don’t know, if he _did_ change you, then—it’s hard enough to restore limbs to someone who’s _alive_ , Brother; I don’t know—”

Ed’s stomach drops, and his heart plummets with it, and it’s a wonder none of his organs are on the floor.

It’s more than that, too, isn’t it?  Whether Al recognizes it or not. It’s more than that, because Al doesn’t—Al _can’t_ —know exactly what it feels like. Not now. Not anymore.

And Ed’s the one who took it from him.

Funny, with revelations, how they land like a hammer blow to an anvil, and your whole being rings with the impact for a second before it clears.

“Okay,” Ed says.

Al, who was in the middle of kitty-rambling something about sharp objects being everywhere and frequently invisible, stops, blinks at him, and then blinks at him again.

“‘Okay’?” Al says.  “What do you mean, ‘okay’?”

“I mean okay,” Ed says.  “If you don’t want me to… whatever… with Roy—not that I _was_ , and not that I was even _thinking_ about it, but since apparently it’s a big concern in this household all of a sudden—then… I won’t.”

Al blinks at him several more times.

Then Al buries his kitty face in his folded front paws and makes a distinctly un-kittyish groaning noise.

“What?” Ed asks, taking two steps forward and then hesitating.  “What’s wrong?  Are you okay?  Is it a hairball?  Wh—”

“That’s not how this conversation was supposed to go,” Al says.  He raises his head enough to twitch his whiskers around in an aggravated sort of way, and Ed stays very still where he’s standing in the middle of their rug, in case he’s the source of the aggravation.  Maybe if he doesn’t move— “You’re supposed to argue, and then I’m supposed to ask why you’re arguing so much, and then you’re supposed to say you’re just like that, and then I’m supposed to ask if you’re in love with him, and then you sputter for about five minutes uninterrupted, and th—”

“What the _fuck_?” Ed says, but he barely has to move for that.  He’s not sure he could, anyway; his heart seems to have stopped, and he won’t get far without a functioning circulatory system.  “I—if I’m— _what_?”

“Well, you are,” Al says.  “Anyway, you were going to protest, and we were going to negotiate, and I was going to give in only on the condition that you let me talk to him first, so that I can give him the shovel speech of his life.  Or his afterlife, I guess.  Only then you went and did the opposite of what you were supposed to do, because you really are _that_ contrary, Brother.”

“I’m not in— _love_ with him,” Ed says.  The word feels strange on his tongue—sharp and soft at the same time; velvety with a tang like iron.  “I’m not in anything with him; he’s just—”

“No, of course not,” Al says, and his ears go flat for a second before they perk up again, and Ed’s not sure any of this is really happening anymore. “It’s just a coincidence that you’ve become progressively more nocturnal since he started coming by regularly; and it’s just a coincidence that you have a totally different smile for the things that he says than you use for everybody else; and it’s just a coincidence that you’ve let him in on every single secret in your life after he met me and was excited instead of scandalized.”

“I mean,” Ed says, helplessly, because this feels a lot like tumbling off a cliff without the slightest idea what lies at the bottom and not being optimistic about the future of your vulnerable skull, “you’re… pretty much the biggest thing, so… once he was on board with that, it was…”

“I don’t _mind_ ,” Al says.  “That’s what I’m trying to say.  I just think you should be careful, because even people as wonderful as Roy aren’t always what they seem like, and circumstances can change, and I don’t know how difficult it is for him when he’s faced with a genuine temptation, because we’ve never seen him pushed to that extreme before.”  He sighs, very loudly, which looks bizarre emanating from a cat.  “It’s just that you were supposed to have to fight for it first, so I could get a couple favors out of it and then lord them over you and then rough him up a little bit.”

“What favors do you need?” Ed asks.  “They don’t have to be favors; you can just _ask_.”

“You’re missing the point, Brother,” Al says.

“I know,” Ed says, because he is, and the part of him that is not just spinning heedlessly through the lightless void is aware of it.  “What is the point?”

“Date Roy,” Al says.

“What?” Ed says.

“Brother,” Al says, “you are a marvel.”

“No,” Ed says.  “I’m confused.”

Al collapses into a puddle of cat on the end table and manages to drape one paw over his face despite the fact that cat joints really aren’t built for gestures like that.  The effect is slightly unsettling, but Ed’s impressed all the same.

“Go to bed, Brother,” Al says.

“But I never finished making dinner,” Ed says.

“Okay,” Al says.  “Finish dinner.  Then go to bed.”

“But your premise is fundamentally flawed,” Ed says.  He takes a breath and strains to make the rest sound casual, which is… probably a bad sign to start with.  “How do you even know Roy wants to date _me_?”

Al somehow convinces his feline throat to make a noise that sounds exactly like a human sob.

“You can tell me later,” Ed says.  “I’ll go finish dinner.”

“To answer your other question,” Al says as Ed starts into the kitchen and tries to remember where the fuck he left off, “which I definitely wasn’t eavesdropping on at all, because it’s just that my ears are so much more sensitive than a person’s, and I always forget, which I can’t possibly be blamed for—Winry’s actually coming tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Ed says.  There’s blood on the counter.  There are one or two little discs of carrot stranded in it like islands.  He probably shouldn’t eat those, but the rest are okay, aren’t they?  “Nice of her to mention it.”

“She sent you a note,” Al says.

“When?”

“Last week,” Al says.  “But…”

At least Ed has two slightly bloodied towels to choose from for cleaning up the rest.  “But what?”

“But she… sent it…” There is a chagrined cat shape skulking around the doorframe, and then it settles underneath one of their kitchen chairs and drops its head onto its paws.  “…with one of those little catnip packets.”

“Just for the record,” Ed says, collecting the forsaken carrots and considering the merits of pitching the towels into the garbage and buying new ones later, “if Winry was mailing _me_ drugs, you’d throw a fucking fit.”

“But she doesn’t,” Al says.  “Because she knows that I’m responsible.”

“Responsible enough to eat my mail when you’re high,” Ed says.

“I didn’t _eat_ it,” Al says, emulating the picture of indignity about as much as can be expected when one’s a cat curled up under a kitchen chair.  “I just… shredded it.  And then got rid of the evidence.”

Fuck the towels.  Ed will just… they’re not _that_ expensive. He rolls the reddened ones up with the bloody carrots and drops them into the trash. “It’s pretty amazing that you can give me crap about Roy and then say things like that all in the space of five minutes.”

Strangely—or maybe not strangely at all—cat features lend themselves well to shit-eating grins.  “What are brothers for if not to appall you with their gifts for hypocrisy?”

“I dunno,” Ed says.  “I heard something once about, y’know, like, support and companionship or something…”

“Meh,” Al says.  “Overrated.  Just like getting to read your own mail.”

They look at each other for a long series of fake-solemn seconds before they start to laugh.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys blew me away with the amount of support that the first half of this got, omg! ;__; Thank you so much! I hope this half makes for a satisfying conclusion! ♥
> 
> Also, I changed a character design a bit – if you're a giant CoS dweeb like yours truly, mea culpa, because it fit much better with what I needed for the scene; and if you're not, you probably won't notice, so hopefully it's fine! XD

Al was only exaggerating a little bit about Ed having shifted his waking hours somewhat to accommodate Roy’s visits.  One of the downsides is that when he _does_ have daytime callers, he is sometimes fast asleep with his face shoved under the pillow and a little pool of drool underneath his cheek.

Such as today, when a relentless round of knocking at the door shakes him out of a bizarre dream involving Al getting buried under an ever-growing pile of catnip that Ed couldn’t dig him out of.

“C’mon!” Winry’s voice howls from the direction of the front room.  “I know you’re in there!  Hurry up!  It’s cold out here, Ed!”

“Shit,” Ed says, more than a bit blearily, into the mattress.  “Al—”

“For the millionth and probably not last time,” Al says, “none of my shapes with opposable thumbs are tall enough to reach the lock.”

“Thanks,” Ed says, attempting to hurl himself upright, missing traction with his left foot, and winding up in a similar position on the floor to the one he was in on the bed.  “ _Oof_.”

Al pads over and judges him a little bit extra hard.  “For what?”

“Calling me tall,” Ed says.

“I didn’t.”

“You did,” Ed says, and the sheer inspiration of it helps him drag himself upright.  The bedframe helps, too.  “In a roundabout sort’f way, but it counts.”  He manages one staggering step towards the hallway, and then another.  Usually the first two steps are the worst, so getting through those without face-planting again is a good sign.  “No take-backs.”

“You’re terrible,” Al says.

“Yup,” Ed says.  “Terrible and _tall_.”

“Ed!” Winry calls through the door.  “I can hear you!”

“I can hear you, too,” Ed calls back.  “So can the next three counties, and the dead.”

Winry is, as ever, unmoved by his scintillating wit.  “Just open the damn door, you jerk!”

He’s finally dragged his weary body close enough to grab the handle, so he figures now’s as good a time as any.  “All right, all right—”

The instant the door parts wide enough from the doorway to admit a person’s shape, Winry flings herself through, and Ed finds himself with two arms full of her.

“Hi,” he says to the swathe of blonde hair suddenly in his face.  He pats at her back a little with the left hand.

“Hi yourself,” she says, releasing him, the better to kneel down on the floor—shoving at her giant case of tools to sling it further over her back—and start rubbing at Al’s ears vigorously.  “Have you both been good?”

“Of course,” Ed says, at the same instant Al arches his back and says “Define ‘good’.”

Winry sighs, but with the grudgingly-fond resignation of someone who’s used to it by now.

Ed scratches at an itchy spot on his hairline and tries to remember how this guest thing works when your visitor isn’t the vampire from down the road.  “You… want some breakfast?”

Winry straightens up from patting Al a little more.  “You mean lunch?”

Ed pauses.  “…possibly.”

Winry sighs again.  It’s a miracle her lungs can take the strain of spending time with them, really.

  


* * *

  


“Okay,” Winry says.  “Extend ’em?”

Instincts again.  It’s easier to lengthen his fingers when he _doesn’t_ think about it; doing it on command’s a million times harder.  Ed closes his eyes and chews on his lip, then opens one eye to peek, watching the Hearthwood fingers yield to the insistent urgings of his brain.  Winry’s watching, too, although from the vantage of having both of her hands underneath his arm, holding it up and straight out for closer scrutiny.

“Good,” she says when he’s coaxed a couple inches out of his fingertips, then sharpened their edges, then blunted them.  “Bring ’em back.”  She turns his arm over before he’s complied, flexes his elbow, and then twists it, examining his shoulder.  She times the pulses of the gold light showing through the gaps in the forearm’s branches; her lips move, just barely, as she counts them out for the better part of a minute, and then she sits back.  “Huh,” she says.  “Everything looks fine.  Nothing to explain that weird pain you’ve been talking about.”  Figures.  “And it doesn’t look like you did anything funny to it, either.”

“Why do you sound so surprised?” Ed asks.

She rolls her eyes.  “You know why.”  She pauses, glancing at the bandage around his other hand.  “What happened there?”

“Slipped while I was cooking,” Ed says, trying to move it out of her field of vision in a way that looks natural, hoping against hope that maybe she’ll forget about it.  “S’fine.”

She frowns.  Mayday.  “Was it a dexterity problem?”

“Yeah,” Ed says, because partial honesty is always the best policy when you’re trying to get away with shit, “but not the kind that you can fix.”

“Oh,” Winry says.  “Well—you need to be more careful.  I dunno how many times I’m gonna have to say that before you get it.  Who wrapped you up?”

“Uh…” Ed’s mind goes ferociously blank.  He is painfully aware of Al curled up on the next couch cushion, lying in wait.  “…Roy.”

Winry’s aware of Al, too, evidently, since she directs the next question to him instead of to Ed himself—like he’s not even there, which is a bit insulting, _actually_.  “Who’s Roy?”

Al sniffs delicately.

Ed deserves this, doesn’t he?   At least he lived a full life, even if it was never a perfect one.

“Roy is Brother’s vampire boyfriend,” Al says.

“He’s not my _boyfriend_ ,” Ed says.

“Yet,” Al says.  “But he is a vampire.”

Winry’s eyes have expanded to a shocking degree.  “Your boyfriend’s a _vampire_?”

“He’s not my boyfriend!” Ed says, _again_.  If he didn’t know for a fact just how smart these two idiots are—

“If Al says he is,” Winry says, “I think I know who I’m gonna believe.”

Ed takes a second to glare at Al, who looks about as cat-smug as they come.  Then he returns his full attention to Winry, who is a much more immediate threat, given that she’s still holding onto his right arm—and toying with it, intently, in a way he’s not too sure he likes.

“So you’re…” Her fingers dance along the back of his, over the knuckles, dipping into the spaces between— “You… prefer… guys.”

He always wondered.

And it always hurt.

And it hurts more now than it ever did as an abstraction—when it was likely, but not guaranteed.  When he didn’t know for sure he’d done that to her.

“Oh,” he says.  They’ve got a map on the wall—real nice.  Someone wanted to barter it for vegetables one time, and Ed’s what he calls ‘an astute businessman’, and what Al calls ‘a sucker’.  He’s glad he got it, now.  It’s something to stare at so that he doesn’t have to look at Winry.  “Um… yeah.  I mean—yeah.  As far as… I know.”

Everything is so quiet and so still for a long second that Ed’s not positive that he’s alive.

The other place is like this—empty.  Empty, and you’re scared.

Winry takes a deep breath, and Ed doesn’t know—

“Well, then,” she says, too-brightly, and the chirpy tone of it rings almost shrill, but it’s a hell of a lot better than any of the alternatives.  “What’s he like?”

Ed, ever the masterful conversationalist, manages, “Who?”

“Roy, you dork,” Winry says.  “He must be really something if he can put up with being your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Ed says.

Winry raises an eyebrow over at Al.

“Technically not,” Al says.  “Or, as mentioned, not _yet_.”

“Y’know,” Ed says, “it would’ve been real useful if you’d let me know a long damn time ago that you were psychic.”

Al cat-smiles.

Winry finally sets Ed’s arm back down beside him on the couch.  She doesn’t scoot away, or anything, but Ed feels the distance like a cold spot in a dark room all the same.

“I’ve always figured he was a little bit psychic,” she says.  “He knew the arm was going to work before I did.”

Out of the uncomfortable conversation frying pan and into the uncomfortable conversation fire.  Ed manages not to cringe, not to shudder, and not to look at Al.

They both know a lot of things they’re not supposed to.

“Well,” Al says, smoothly, “that was less a matter of clairvoyance and more a matter of realizing that Brother’s the single stubbornest person on the face of the planet, and if anyone alive could _will_ Hearthwood to graft to their body, it’d be him.”

“Excuse me,” Ed says.  “ _You’re_ the stubbornest person on the face of the planet.  I’m not even a close second; you got me beat by miles.”

“That is a slanderous lie,” Al says, sitting up straighter, dignified as a fucking sphinx.  “If you don’t stop spreading such heinous and unsubstantiated calumny, I’ll take you to court.”

“No, you won’t,” Ed says.  “Because it’d be a—”

“Don’t,” Al says.

“ _Cat_ astrophe,” Ed says.

“I don’t know why I even try,” Al says.

“Me neither,” Winry says.  She shifts in closer, seizes Ed’s arm, and loops hers around it, not seeming to notice or care that it’s cold, and hard, and capable of giving splinters.  “Do you have stuff to sell in town?  Can we go see that antique shop you guys’ve got again?  I want to take every single one of those clocks apart.”

“You should probably buy them first,” Ed says.  “Or at least ask permission.”

“They’ll work better after she puts them back together than they did before,” Al says.

Winry beams.  “Thanks, Al!”

“ _I_ know that,” Ed says, “and you know that—but the shop owner doesn’t, and the cops sure don’t.”

“Since when do you care about the cops?” Winry asks.

“Hey,” Ed says.  “I run a respectable business here and pay rent and taxes and all that shit.  I have to care.”

“Eew,” Al and Winry say in unison.

“Fuck you guys,” Ed says.  “Okay, fine, let’s go drool over some stupid clocks.”

“They’re great clocks,” Winry says.  “Hey, I bet that if Al was kitten-sized, and we put him in a basket, nobody’d give me any trouble about bringing him into any store we wanted.”

Ed makes eye contact with Al and holds it.  “We can put a little bow on him.”

“Yeah!” Winry says.

Remarkable, really, how clearly Al can make a cat’s facial features say _You are going to pay for that in perpetuity, Brother_.

  


* * *

  


They see Winry off at the train station right as the sun sets.  The gold light makes her pale hair spark so beautifully, and she’s been turning heads all day, but never more than now.

Ed has a long list of wishes that solve nothing, prove nothing, and won’t ever come true.

She’s one of them.

She drags him into a too-tight hug that almost shifts his clothes enough to show the Hearthwood, and he has to make a couple of subtle tugs to his cloak and his sleeve to make sure it’s tucked away.

“Good luck with your vampire boyfriend,” she says.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Ed says.

She scoops up the little basket, which she’d set down on top of her suitcase, and shoves it at his chest.  Al mews in protest.

“Sure,” she says.  “Just—let me know how it goes, all right?”

He hopes, more than anything, that someday she’ll find someone who deserves her.

“All right,” he says.

She pets Al’s fuzzy little head and then raps her knuckles against the wood of Ed’s shoulder, which is really not funny and never has been.

“You two idiots take care of each other,” she says.  “Okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ed says.  “You give all those fancy big-city healers our best and whatever.”

“You know I will,” she says brightly.  “It freaks them out that you’re still alive.”

Sometimes, it freaks Ed out, too.

“Good,” he says.  “Nothing motivates me quite as much as spiting people who don’t think I should be possible.”

“That’s the spirit,” Winry says.  Then she pats his cheek, turns on her heel, and waves over her shoulder as she hauls her luggage towards the train door.  “Don’t die!”

“Trying,” Ed says.

Al attempts to disguise a very loud laugh as a kitten sneeze, to mixed success.

  


* * *

  


Ed has turned his index finger into a spoon, which he maintains is brilliant no matter how many times Al sighs meaningfully.  This way, he can stir his tea without dirtying any utensils while he pores over another book that might just yield some clues on how to sort out Al’s corporeal complications.

Well—that’s the theory, anyway.  In practice, he’s spent a lot of time watching the tea swirl around his spoon-finger and thinking about…

Things.  People.  Relationships.  Winry.  And Roy.

Thinking about it won’t change any of it—that’s the problem.  And Winry’s going to make it through this, and past it, just like she’s made it through and past every other roadblock, running the gamut of the scale from cataclysms to inconveniences, that’s ever come her way.  Him wallowing in guilt won’t help her heal faster.  Him denying himself what he wants won’t give her what she does.  The universe thrives on balances, sure, and every equation evens out eventually, but it’s never as cut and dry as a one-for-one exchange.  Not with things like this.

Magic’s easy; people are a _pain_.

He extracts his finger from the teacup, taps it on the edge to try to dry it, lets himself feel a little smug regardless of Al’s judgment, and then takes a sip.

And almost spews it across a book that cost the better part of two months’ savings.

When did his tea get _that_ cold?  How late is it?

“Hey, Al,” he calls over.  “Where’s Roy?”

“At his palatial estate, presumably,” Al calls back, sounding like Ed just woke him up, which is only fair.  “Weeping into a silk-covered, gold-tasseled throw pillow about how terrified he is of my protective brotherly wrath.”

“I mean, yeah,” Ed says, and the itch of uncertainty deepens into a prickling, and the prickling spreads slowly down his right arm.  “But isn’t he more the type to show up here and turn the charisma on full-blast and try to make some sort of weird pseudo-logical arrangement with you to circumvent the wrath part altogether?”

The silence stretches long enough for Ed to get up from the table, cross to the door, and watch Al shift his paws uncomfortably.

“You know,” Al says, “you’re… right.”

Ed will have to revel in that later, because right now the prickle in his arm has been matched by a throbbing sort of urgency in the back of his head.  “He should—be here.  Right?”

“Maybe he thought Winry was staying over,” Al says.

“He didn’t know Winry was coming,” Ed says.  “ _I_ didn’t know Winry was coming, ’cause you ate my mail.”

“I didn’t eat it,” Al says.  “I obliterated it.  Completely different.  Is—do you think—I mean, it’s not even midnight; we shouldn’t—assume that it’s something…”

“Bad?” Ed asks.  He circles his shoulder, once, twice.  The pain doesn’t change—just a low, persistent, ongoing inevitability.

“Stop panicking,” Al says.  “And stop trying to get me to panic.  You know it’s not pretty when _I_ panic.”

“Fine,” Ed says.  “Let’s just go over there and make sure it’s nothing.  It’ll take five minuets.  No big deal.  And then nobody has to panic about anything.”

Al’s tail twitches, and then his ears twitch, and then he huffs, unfolds onto his feet, stretches, and shakes himself to resettle his fur.

“All _right_ ,” he says.  “But if we get close and hear weeping into silken pillows, I’m going to give you—”

“Crap for the rest of my life,” Ed says.  “Deal.”

“Deal, then,” Al says.

  


* * *

  


Ed tries not to worry about their other neighbors—the ones between their place and Roy’s.  If any of those people were going to report them for suspicions of witchcraft and whatnot, they would have done it by now, right?  This certainly isn’t the first time they’ve seen Ed walking down the road, cloak billowing out behind him, with a sleek black cat trotting alongside.  It’s not the first time they’ve seen him talking, either to it or to himself.  If they were really concerned, the police would’ve been at his door a long damn time ago, asking all of the awkward questions and rifling through the books.  And that would’ve ended really, really badly, and he and Al would have had to make a run for it again, and…

Well.  Point is, he needs to calm down, because even if someone is watching, they’re not seeing anything they haven’t seen before.

“We should buy more fish,” Al is saying.  “I know you’ll whine interminably about how it makes your clothes smell like ‘ocean-death’ for weeks, but it’s so _good_ , and it’s good _for_ you, and you probably need more fish in your diet, Brother, I mean it.  It sure wouldn’t hurt to t—”

They turn the corner towards the end of the lane, and Roy’s house comes into view.

Ed stumbles, because his body has momentum, but the rest of him has _stopped_.

They’ve never been into Roy’s house—or at least Ed hasn’t; goodness friggin’ knows what Al gets up to skulking around the neighborhood in the dead of night, and he’s just the type to sneak into other people’s homes and poke around.

But Ed’s seen it from this distance a million times, and seeing it now—

Something shattered all of the huge front windows and shredded the heavy red curtains that usually drape just behind them.  The front door hangs off its hinges, halfway open; shards of wood litter the long cobblestone path up to the front steps; several of the stones have cracked.  The wrought-iron gate dangles, too—twisted, half-melted, which seems like less of a surprise upon noticing the patches of smoldering _fire_ on some sections of the lawn—

“Oh, shit,” Ed breathes out, and he hears his own voice shaking, and then his feet shift before he’s even tried to lift them— “Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, _shit_ —”

He pelts down the rest of the road to the stupid broken stone path so fast that the air resistance nearly makes the cloak choke him; he dodges around the tangled remains of the gate—

Something moves in the dark.

Al’s beside him, growing, before he’s even finished sharpening the first finger of his right hand to prepare it to cut into the left, and the shuffling noises intensify, and the shadows coalesce, and—

It’s—

A horse.

It’s a horse that’s scared _shitless_ , eyes rolling, frothing with sweat, prancing back and forth desperately.

“Can you talk to her?” Ed asks Al, starting for the door again—what’s left of the door.  “I gotta look for—”

“I am not your designated animal interpreter,” Al yells after him.

“Of course you’re not,” Ed yells back.  “Just talk to her.”

He takes the front steps two at a time and then fits himself through the gap between the door and the doorframe, dancing over the thick slivers of wood scattered on the front step, on the threshold, on the carpet runner inside—

“Roy?” he calls.  All of the intact lamps in the front parlor are still lit, but almost all of them are knocked over, several were shattered—or, more accurately, blasted to fucking bits—and the hallway’s dark.  He forges right the hell on into it anyway.  “Roy, are you here?  Hey, it’s not—it’s not fuckin’ funny if—”

He steps on something that slides, and he stumbles back, barely catching himself against the wall—

His eyes adjust just enough to make out a gleam of metal on the floor.  He crouches down and reaches out, tentatively—touches cold steel and then tightly-wrapped leather…

It’s a sword.

He curls his fingers around the handle, hefts it, stands, and steps back so that the light from the front room will reach it.

He’s not sure what he thinks he’s looking for, but what he finds is an ornate—but use-scarred—silver pommel, and a blade spattered with a fluid as viscous as blood but _so_ much darker.

His heart drops like cold lead—dragging his throat and his ribs and his stomach right along with it; pulling everything inside him down—

But when his right knee trembles, and he staggers back another step, the liquid catches the light.

It doesn’t glimmer black, like ink—like ichor.

It’s green.

It’s not Roy’s.

Roy _spilled_ it—whatever happened here, Roy fought it; Roy fought back—

If Ed’s not mistaken, the carpet further down is wet with the not-blood, not not-human-blood; one of the walls bears deep, deep gashes through the fancy wallpaper that almost look like the hallmark of… claws.  _Huge_ claws, like—

“It’s a _dragon_ ,” Al says, slipping through the doorway just as Ed starts back towards it with the sword in his hand.  Al’s a little cat again, low and lean; Ed doesn’t know what form he took to calm the horse, but it must have worked.  “Where’d you—never mind.  She said it came out of nowhere, wrecked the place, flew off again just as fast, and it took him—”

“Where?” Ed asks.

Al flicks his tail.  “She said it looked like it went off that way—towards the hills.”

“It’ll be bleeding,” Ed says, tilting the sword blade.  “Can you follow it?”

“Ed,” Al says, “it could be _anywhere_.  We don’t—we only have until the sun comes up.”

“I know,” Ed says.  His heart keeps banging so loud it drowns out his thoughts, but he tries to force them through; he draws in a deep breath and starts for the door.  “C’mon.  Can you talk to her one more time for me?”

Al scampers out of his way and trails him down the steps, somehow managing to stay practically underfoot while deftly avoiding his boots.  Fucking _cats_.  “What do you want me to say?”

“Tell her we’re gonna find him,” Ed says, striding across the lawn towards where the shape of a skittish horse is silhouetted against the deeper dark.  “But we need her help.”

  


* * *

  


“I hate birds,” Al says.  He makes sure it’s loud enough for Ed to hear over the hoofbeats and the scattering dirt and the wind whipping past Ed’s ears, because he’s almost as much of an asshole as Ed is.  That’s probably why they get along so well, to be honest.  “You know I hate birds.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, “I do.  And I’m sorry, but the other option’s you bein’ shoved in my pocket, and you hate that, too.”

All of this is true, but it’s also a little bit selfish, because having a falcon on his shoulder, talons buried in the Hearthwood, sharp eyes on the road ahead, with a sword hanging from his belt and his cloak streaming out behind him, as the horse gallops at an incredible speed is just too damn badass to pass up.

It would be even better if Al was a raven, but Ed needs the raptor eyesight thing right now, and this is still pretty frigging great.

The scent and the occasional splashes of blood both are faint and far between, but even dragons have to come to roost somewhere, and these hills are full of old ruins.  Ed’s willing to bet—

Well.  He doesn’t have much of a choice.  And he knows he’s gambling with Roy’s afterlife here, but—

“That’s got to be it,” Al says.  “Creepy flickering lights on, suitably old and decrepit, I’ve got a _really_ bad feeling all of a sudden…”

“Sounds about right,” Ed says, squinting at the horizon, which hasn’t relinquished enough for him to see it yet.

Slowly but surely, the shadowed night coughs up a silhouette of craggy hills and ancient stone—one of those dilapidated forts or castles, or mansions built to look like them; there are so many tucked into the mountains of this region that Ed has to wonder how many are genuine, and how many are entirely for show.

This one’s a prime specimen: falling apart, rather quickly by the looks of it, but with a low wall still in place at the foot of the knoll on which it stands.  The battlements have long since begun to crumble, but flickering lights dance in the empty window panes along the front of the entrance hall.  A few spare gnarled, lightning-scorched trees rattle, arms spread skyward, on either side of the door.

To be fair—if “fair” is the right word, or even remotely applicable—if Ed was planning to conduct toweringly dark magic rituals and/or possibly summon arcane demons, this is the kind of place he’d do it.

The huge, deep marks in the dirt are still new—the soil’s wet, and Ed can smell that it’s still adjusting to the displacement.  Apparently this patch of Earth doesn’t particularly appreciate being torn up by dragon claws.

Ed ties the horse to one of the spikes on the wall at the bottom of the path.  He deliberately does a crap job, so she can make a break for it if she gets spooked, or shit goes sour.

Al ruffles his feathers.  If he starts preening, Ed’s never going to let him live it down.  “So what’s the plan?”

“The plan,” Ed says, “is to kick their sorry asses and save Roy.”

Al ruffles his feathers significantly harder.  “Could you be a little more specific?” he asks.

“Not really,” Ed says.  “That’s as far as I got.”

“Oh, good,” Al says.

“Yup,” Ed says.

He squares his shoulders, which is a bit more difficult with Al’s weight on the right one, and starts towards that looming door.

Dragons are fine.  He’s got a sword.  And more important than that, he’s got spite and a vengeance.

The darker powers in this neck of the woods have been tromping on people like him and Roy—hardly innocents, but a long damn way from dangerous—for far too long.  It’s time to show them what the fuck is what.

Either the hill’s not as steep as it looks, or the sheer force of his anger has smothered any petty physical reactions like panting or leg cramps; they reach the top in what feels like the span of blinking, and Ed draws the sword in his left hand and pushes at the huge brass door handle with the right.

It’s almost a shame it’s not locked.  He could have made one hell of a statement with that entrance.

Less of a shame is the fact that evidently the monstrosities in charge had no inclination that anyone would follow them, since they’re nowhere to be seen, and they left their charge bound but unattended.  Less of a shame still—Roy tilts his head towards the door, and his eyes try to focus on Ed, which unequivocally means that he’s _alive_ —

Well.  In a manner of speaking, anyway.  No more or less alive than he was last night, which is the important thing.

His torso’s securely tied, with an unnecessary-looking abundance of thick metal ropes—silver?—to a standing version of some kind of wooden operating table, and a swathe of black-stained bandages encircle his right wrist, which is not quite as inspiring, but the alive thing is what counts.

“Hey, bastard,” Ed says.  Al scoffs audibly.

Roy beams at him, wan but wonderful and characteristically over the top.  The fangs gleam in the torchlight, because of course it’s torchlight—if there’s one thing the assholes responsible for this got right, it’s the ambiance.  “Good evening.”

Apparently the way Ed stops in his tracks and stares disbelievingly conveys everything he can’t even hope to articulate, including the very pertinent _What the actual fuck, Mustang?_

“Well, I’ve had worse,” Roy says.  “And now you’re here, and that is unequivocally good.”

“Are you drunk?” Ed asks, but at least he’s convinced his feet to start moving again.

“No,” Roy says, “but I am rather a bit lightheaded.  Has anyone ever told you that you look fantastic in the avenging angel role?  You really do.  Is that my sword?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  He’s close enough now—close enough to reach out and touch the ropes.  Silver, all right.  Those _fuckers_ ; it must be killing him.  “Picked it up from what’s left of your house.”  He nods to the bandaged wrist.  “How much did they get out of you?”

“Enough to make me really very miffed,” Roy says, rather airily, but at least it’s self-explanatory why.  “Some sort of terrible ritual going on; I heard a bit of screaming and an explosion or two.  Must be quite a show down there.  Basement.  The one who cornered you at the docks is in on it.”  He pauses, lips pursed.  Ed wants to kiss him.  Ed has to get him the fuck out of here.  “Which… is bad.  Which is very bad.  Since that must mean they’ll want you and dear feathery Alphonse, too.”

“Oh, my word,” Al says, so quietly Ed’s not sure if Roy can hear.

Ed wedges a sharp edge of Hearthwood under an iron connective joint in the rope and starts sawing.  “Yeah, well,” he says.  “They made one big fuckin’ mistake.”

Roy smiles faintly.  “Might be easier to destroy the boards, rather than the rope, my dear.  Was the mistake underestimating your proportionally towering rage?”

“Fuck,” Ed says.  Even woozy and in the process of being poisoned by the purity of the metal, the bastard’s right.  At least starting to hack the rack to pieces relieves some of the pent-up anger in question.  “And—no.  I mean—yeah.  I mean—okay, two mistakes.”

“Lovely,” Roy says, in that same strangely distant sort of voice.

“Brother,” Al says, in a much clearer, much shaper, and much more ominous one, “we’ve got company.”

“Do we in-fucking-deed,” Ed says, stepping back.  “Where are my manners?”

“Probably the same place as your sense of tact,” Al says.

“Shut it,” Ed says.  He gestures towards Roy’s predicament—specifically the part where he was only partway through beating the shit out of the boards Roy’s strapped to.  “Can you handle—”

“On it,” Al says.

Ed turns with Roy’s sword in his left hand, changing his right into a second blade—shorter, blunter, and better for hacking the heads off of any creature dumb enough to fuck with him in a place like this.

The one that descends the arching stone staircase, so slowly that the melodrama _has_ to be deliberate, is admittedly big enough to give him some trouble regardless.  He’d sort of figured that any lizard of a size to carry a grown man—grown man-turned-vampire, whatever—off into the night would, per the laws of physics, have to be impressive as all get-out, but this is still a little more than he bargained for.

Despite the fact that this behemoth boasts iridescent green scales, frilly face-things, broad eggplant-purple wings folded further down its back (which match the frilly face-things), and many, _many_ teeth in addition to the claws, something about it rings uncomfortably familiar.

It takes Ed a second of staring the monster down for recognition to dawn, slow and inevitable and extremely cold: it’s the eyes.  Dark purple and slitted and calculating—far too smart.

“Well,” Ed says, loudly, trying to buy Al more time to free Roy from the stupid table before the silver straight-up knocks him out.  “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Interesting,” the dragon says.  The hissy, raspy, low-burn voice sounds pretty much exactly like Ed would have expected a dragon’s voice to sound, if he’d had the _slightest_ fucking idea this one could talk—which he didn’t, which means he startles so hard he stumbles backwards a full three steps, which succinctly fucks any chance he had of counter-intimidation up to this point.  “I expected you to be…”

“Don’t even fucking say it,” Ed says.  “I was gonna make the ass-kicking quick for you, but if you go there, I am gonna have to beat you down _real_ slow, and nobody here’s got time.”

“Oh,” a new voice—quieter, at least, and marginally less sinister—says.  The form it belongs to sidles in around one of the dragon’s enormous feet.  Of course it’s that damn kid from that first night.  Of _course_ it is.  “You’re going to impress us, are you?  How charming.”

Ed smiles.  There is wood flying fucking everywhere; opposable thumbs or not, Al _has_ to be close—

“Y’know,” he says, “for a couple of assholes trying to get their hands on some witches, you really don’t know anything about ’em, do you?”

“We know you’ve been to the Gate,” the smaller one says, grinning back—but the expression’s too wide and so damn chilly that it’s really more like a death mask than a grin.  “We know ordinary mortals can’t meld with Hearthwood.  And we know that your little garden produces a remarkable amount year-round, regardless of the blights that touch the others, year after year, rain or shine.”  He gestures, sharply, to Al.  So much for distraction, apparently.  “You have a _familiar_.”

“I take umbrage at that,” Al says.  “Familiars aren’t senti—”

“You can take all the umbrage you want later,” Ed says.  “Is that it?”

There’s a pause.

The kid and the dragon exchange glances—which would, in other circumstances that involved a significantly smaller risk of death, be hilarious.

“It’s everything that matters,” the kid says.  “With just your little friend there—and he’s much more sapped than you are, as you know—we were able to get _so_ much done.  I can only imagine what we can make with you and your shadow.”

“I am _not_ his shadow,” Al says.  “Brother, tell th—oh… _hell_.”

Surprise registers, clear as day, on both faces, and it’s really fascinating to watch dragon features process shock.

Unfortunately, it seems like the last bit of melodrama was meant to be a cue line, since an extraordinarily voluptuous woman has just descended the other arc of the staircase to stand, arms akimbo, one hip out, next to the dragon’s other huge front foot.

There’s another pause.

“Um,” she says.  “Excuse me.”

“Shit,” the kid says.  “Right—ah—this is—we can make so _many_ —what was—”

The real pity is that there’s no time to point and laugh at the incompetence, because the woman’s fingers bear more than a passing resemblance to Ed’s, when they lengthen into giant razor-sharp spears like that—

And that’s _Ed’s_ cue to kick this thing into high gear.

He sheathes the sword through his belt again, opens his left hand, and slices all his fingers near the first knuckle with one of the sharp edges of the right.  He clenches the injured hand while the blood starts to run, and curls the right into another fist—collecting Hearthwood in slow-building layers to fortify it, solidify it, turn it into something like a miniature battering ram—

“Oh, _my_ ,” the kid says.  “How cute.  Are you going to do some blood magic?”

“All magic’s blood magic,” Ed says.  “You really don’t know, do you?”

“Know _what_?” the kid says.

“About witches,” Ed says.  “About where the power comes from.”

They all look sick of talking about it—which is dandy, actually, because Ed is, too.

He drops to his knees and slams the Hearthwood fist into one of the wide cracks in the stone floor, splitting it open so that it gapes all the way down to the soil underneath.

Then he opens his slicked and bleeding left hand and flattens it against the Earth.

“Uh oh,” the kid says, offering an overstated snicker before sauntering down the stairs, beckoning for the other two to follow.  The rumbling starts so low that he doesn’t seem to notice.  “Maybe we should back off—that was pretty scary, after all; maybe he’s going to bleed into the ground so much it’ll compromise the foundations of th—”

The rumbling gets louder.

The pillars underneath the stairs start to shake.

The kid grabs for the railing on instinct, looking around himself first.

Then at Ed.

“What th—”

Witches’ blood speaks to the Earth.

And the Earth listens.

Ed goes for the staircase first—maybe he can just bring this place down into a heap of rubble without having to tussle with any of these assholes directly.  He sends three broad columns of rock and hard-packed dirt up through the marble platform where the dragon stands, shattering the stone; everything splinters in a torrent of dust and bewildered noise—

Alas.  Wings.

By all rights, that horrifying misapprehension of a creature shouldn’t be able to generate enough lift to hover _anywhere_ , let alone in an enclosed space, but apparently even physics bows to abominations after a certain threshold of horrificness.  The kid and the woman dove out of the way somewhere; Ed saw their shapes moving but couldn’t track where they landed, because he had to keep an eye on the columns and the dragon and an ear out for Al—

Instinct saves his sorry ass yet again: what he hears isn’t the dulcet tones of Al’s whining; it’s a whistle like air being split by something very narrow and extremely sharp.

He ducks and rolls to the left side, raising his right arm to shield himself before he even hits the broken floor, and the tips of the woman’s razor-spearing fingers glance off of his Hearthwood forearm—so close to stabbing contact that sawdust hisses free of the tiny cuts on impact.

Winry’s gonna be _pissed_.

Which is fine, actually, because Ed’s pissed, too, and rage tends to tamp down the panic-adrenaline, which works to his advantage.

Twisting as he finds his feet, he dodges another swipe of the slender jet-black spears, viciously kicks a chunk of flooring out of the way, and drops to his left knee again to slap his wet hand back down against the dirt.  He has to call deeper, and it takes a moment longer, but—

Evidently a moment’s too fucking long: long enough, at least, for the kid to resurface, diving at him with a pair of knives—and his bared teeth look like so many more—

Ed hurls himself sideways, forced to land on the soft shoulder this time; that’ll bruise—

“Hey, Al!” he calls, heedlessly; he can’t afford to take his eyes off of opponents like these to figure out where to direct his voice.  “Little hel—”

Al doesn’t bother replying, but Ed doesn’t hold it against him, because a gryphon swooping between him and the kid and clasping two clawed feet around the latter’s shoulders—the better to lift the little shit off towards the stratosphere—is way better than a response anyway.

No time to triumph, though; Ed slips under another elongating jab of the woman’s fingers—this one so close it grazes his hair as he moves—to strike towards her ankles with his heel.  She dances clear, smirking, and raises her hand again—

Which is precisely when the spire of pure bedrock pierces the flooring from beneath and twines upward around her like a strangling vine.

Ed scrambled back in the nick of time, which leaves him half-sprawled on the shattered stonework, still bleeding freely from his left hand.  A screech alerts him to Al’s predicament—well, the fact that Al _has_ a predicament, but not what kind; he sees the huge, feathered wings beating hard, and Al rises above a surviving section of banister on the second floor.  Whatever the kid did to work himself free of those claws, Al didn’t like it, which means a betting man wouldn’t like the kid’s current odds.

With the woman trapped for now, Ed turns his attention to—

Roy.

Stupid, soft-eyed, beautiful Roy, who—as Ed’s focus finds him—grits his teeth, strains against the silver to draw his left arm forward, and slams his elbow back against the few remaining boards.  They fracture around the impact and then fall away—

And Roy shakes the silver loops from around himself, and the combination of their gleaming expanses and the shimmying motion of his body might be enough to kill a lesser being, so it’s a good thing Ed’s a fucking Gate-kissed dark-spawn after all.

It occurs to Ed—a whip-quick, feverish flash of thought—that he hasn’t paid attention to the dragon in a while.

He turns and ducks in the same motion, by way of which instinct saves his ass one more time, because the torrent of flame jetting from the dragon’s mouth misses him by a matter of inches.  Soot streaks the broken flagstones, and he chokes on ash as he automatically gasps in a deep breath for the sigh of relief.

Even before Hearthstone, there are prices to pay for the Knowing, and the magic, and the thousand other little gifts that accompany the power.  There have to be some vulnerabilities to balance that out, or the universe wouldn’t stay stable, after all.

Witches are very, very flammable.

Once the searing rush of the fire finishes echoing in his ears, he hears a cracking sound from the other direction, which he doesn’t like much better.

Evidently, the woman’s claws won’t dull for anything as petty as concentrated bedrock from ancient local hills—slowly but surely, she’s splitting the curves of rock containing her, hacking gaps into the segments with the obvious intent of shoving one or two pieces out entirely, so that she can slip through.

“Ed!” Roy says.  Ed’s trying to keep one eye on her and one eye on the dragon—maybe once he’s done fixing Al, he should work on adding more eyeballs to the regular human form; it’d give him one hell of an edge.

Probably Roy wouldn’t want to fuck him, though.  And with Roy looking like _that_ —pale but sharp-eyed, clothes speckled with dust and splinters, hair a matted mess, dropped halfway into a defensive crouch with one surprisingly steady hand extended—

Well.  Right now, that sounds like a sacrifice Ed’s not willing to make.

“Sword?” Roy asks.

It’s just like him to make demands in the middle of a goddamn battle with a bunch of supernatural beings that want them all dead.

Fortunately, it looks like the damn dragon has to work himself back up to a good mouth-explosion after expending one, which has bought them… a couple of seconds, at least.  Ed doesn’t know how many, so he rolls to his feet, drags the sword out of his belt, hefts it, and tosses the hilt Roy’s way.

“Knock yourself out,” he says.

Roy catches it, twirls it, and raises it, weight settling on his back foot, eyes on the target who has nearly worked herself free of the stone.

Forget relinquishing extra eyes; Ed would give up the other _arm_ to tap that.

The next enormous breath the dragon draws sounds like the kind of trouble that ends in cinders, though, which means Ed needs to get his shit together and take that thing down before it cooks them all where they stand.

Between the accumulated filth and the expenditure of fluid, his left hand’s stopped actively bleeding—which is a pain in the ass, but one’s that’s easily fixed.  He slices directly across the middle of his palm this time, flexing his fingers quickly and repeatedly, like he’s trying to work out a strain.  The blood moves faster when you try to use it.

“Hey, Al,” he calls up.  “You okay?”

“Define ‘okay’,” Al shouts back, and there’s a flurry of feathers, but no explanation of whether he’s just being a smartass or actually needs help, so…

So Ed’s just going to have to take care of this gigantic monster with the equally obnoxious powers of flight and flame breath and then go check on him.

Blood streams down his wrist, but it’s not quite enough, and he needs far more room to maneuver to have a hope in hell of pulling this off.

Al appears to be grappling with the kid, who somehow seems to have an endless supply of knives.  The woman’s approximately four seconds away from shivving her way out of what was meant to be a more-than-temporary bedrock prison.  And the dragon’s probably two deep breaths out from another wall of fire.

Ed does the only thing he can do:

“Hey, fuckface,” he shouts directly at the inconceivably large, enormously destructive monster.  “Come and fuckin’ get me—or are you chicken?  I mean, evolutionarily speaking, it kinda makes sense, but—”

He can never count on luck to pull him through, but provocation sometimes works in a pinch.

The dragon unleashes a roar that shakes the last few unmarred pillars of the place, rattles the roof, and makes Ed’s ears pop violently—and then beats its wings to gain some altitude, snarls nearly as deafeningly as the roar, and dives for Ed.

The sheer _size_ of the creature coming at him makes his stomach drop, his head spin, and his blood freeze.  He hears his heart beat in his ears—once, twice—and watches the colossal killing machine bear down on his very, very fragile little form.

…comparatively little.  Obviously.

“ _Ed_!”

Roy must think he’s some kind of amateur.

Arguably, he is.  But he’s _badassest_ kind.

He waits until he can see the pupils of the dragon’s eyes—until it’s way too fucking late for it to alter its own momentum—

And at the last possible second, he hurls himself forward, underneath it, rolling head over heels, not caring what he bruises or what he breaks—

Because what the dragon just broke was the floor—slamming into an ungainly landing, skidding across the remnants of the floor, wrecking what remained and leaving a gaping hole of open Earth behind.

Ed allows himself a small grin and a breathless “ _Sucker_.”

Then he scrambles upright, races to the edge, and shoves his bloody hand as deep into the dirt as it’ll go.

Big magic takes concentration—focus, intensity, something a lot like skill.  He’s not sure if most people would call it spiritual or not, and he doesn’t really care.  Probably.  His lips move; he barely notices anymore; incantations just sort of… happen… for him.  That’s one of those Knowing things.

He can feel the Earth breathing in perfect time—can feel its pulse beating, can feel its veins swelling, its molecules shivering one against the other.  An unimaginable amount of matter rolls throughout the universe; they’re all made of the same stuff.  His blood’s just coming home.

His eyes fall halfway shut; in the shadowy corners of his peripheral vision, motion swerves and dips and vanishes—something sharp darts towards him; something bright silver fends it off.  The blood’s seeping steadily down.  The soil between his half-curled fingers shudders, softly, once.

The gold light inside the Hearthstone sharpens, brightens—he can _feel_ it for the first time in as long as he can remember—ambient heat—

Or maybe that’s the dragon planting both enormous feet in the soil five feet from his extremely vulnerable face.

He looks up.  His eyes will be seething with gold light, too, likely.  When you push it this hard—towards the limits of what you and the Earth together are capable of; when you will yourself to bleed and pour yourself in with it and _beg_ the powers of the world to align with you—

The Earth is vibrating underneath his hand.  The dragon probably can’t feel it—yet.

It must feel something pleasant, however, because it gives him a huge fucking grin, shifts its giant shoulders, and settles back on its hind haunches, drawing in another breath that rasps like flint on steel—so forcefully that it drags Ed’s cloak towards its mouth, and a flurry of dirt swirls around him—

It hesitates as the quaking of the ground beneath its claws becomes too pronounced to ignore, glancing down at the jittering dust—

But then it appears to remember that it was halfway to incinerating Ed, and it would really like to be all the way to incinerating Ed, so it had better get going on that.

The vast maw parts, ropes of saliva swinging between ivory teeth that might, come to think of it, stand taller than Ed himself.  The giant tongue curls; the dragon rears its neck back in preparation; a spark—two—

Maybe he won’t make it.

Maybe he miscalculated; what the fuck good is a hope and a prayer to a creature as miserably forsaken as he is; maybe—

The rumbling intensifies until he can’t remember ever hearing anything else—the ground splits in a dozen places, parting to allow the passage of roots as big around as Ed’s whole torso.

They surge upward, twisting wildly, growing at impossible, unthinkable speeds—

And curl around the dragon in ten, fifteen, twenty places—around its legs and its wings and its snapping tail; and, paramountly, around its jaws, wrapping around them almost instantaneously to seal them shut.

The dragon’s purple eyes go wide.

It jerks against the roots, but they hold firm; it tries to toss its head—nothing.

The flame catches.

Its cheeks balloon with the force of it; smoke pours out of its nostrils; its eyes water—its whole throat lights vibrant orange, illuminating the elegant edges of the scales from within, searing backwards, and the dragon writhes more violently still, but nothing gives—

A sound that combines the rawest parts of both anger and distress drags Ed’s attention away from the morbidly fascinating process of the literal backfire—it’s the woman, who’s apparently been distracted from tormenting Roy by Ed’s rather considerable parlor trick.

“What the _hell_ have you done, you wretched boy?” she asks, and he can only assume she’s talking to him, since she must know that Roy’s too old to be a boy, not to mention decidedly less wretched.

Movement catches his eye, and this time it’s the kid—vaulting over the one remaining banister and scrambling down the stairs.  Al, still in the gryphon shape, comes hot on his heels—

But he and the woman focus all of their efforts on hacking at the roots to try to free the dragon.

Ed shoves himself backwards, not sure yet if he can trust his knees; he kick-push-crawls far enough to reach an unmarred portion of the floor and slides himself up onto it.  Al leaps from the staircase, spreads his wings, coasts down, and alights delicately beside him, raising one paw and tilting his head slightly.  Something about eagle eyes always makes him look thoughtful and terrifying at once.

The woman and the kid have concentrated their attack on the thickest root securing the dragon’s front right foot, and the woman’s incredible finger-spears make quick work of it; Ed winces as sap spills, and chunks of beautiful plant matter fly everywhere, thudding as they tumble to the dirt below.

The dragon wrenches himself loose, and Ed’s heart skips; he tries to force his legs to hold his weight; Al tenses next to him—

But then the woman and the kid clamber up onto the dragon’s back, and it barely even pauses to give them a frigid glare—and a low, hoarse, scorched-sounding cough—before it snaps both wings open, beats them furiously, and takes to the sky.

Ed watches with his mouth half-open as the faint figure dwindles into the distance.

It—is that it?  Did they give up?  Did—

Roy drops to one knee, jamming the end of the sword blade into the dirt, keeping one hand clasped around the hilt.  He lets his head fall for a long second, shoulders heaving, and then drags himself upright.  He leaves the sword stuck into the Earth and staggers over to where Ed’s lying there in a puddle of his own cloak, and he extends one of those too-damn-beautiful hands.

Ed takes it.

It’s a struggle, given that the adrenaline is doing that awful bottoming-out thing, which gives the blood loss a perfect opportunity to catch up—but between the two of them, they manage to finagle Ed up onto his feet, and from there it devolves into a vigorous session of the obsessively-brushing-the-other-person-off-as-an-excuse-to-touch-them game.  Not that Ed’s ever played before, but something about it seems way too natural to be anything other than a hardwired human impulse.

“Didn’t know you were so handy with a sword,” Ed says when he’s having a hard time even pretending that there’s any dirt left on Roy’s waistcoat.

“Didn’t know you were so handy with a tree,” Roy says, grinning at him, and why the _hell_ do the points of his eyeteeth look delicious instead of vicious?  Ed must’ve lost more blood even than he thought.

Maybe Roy sees it in his eyes; maybe Roy smells it on him; maybe Roy’s just a good guesser, and his luck’s on the rebound after what started out his night.

He lifts his right hand and cups it along the side of Ed’s jaw, gauze bandage scraping gently.  His fingertips slide back into the soft hair just behind Ed’s ear, and that…

Is transcendent.  That alone would be enough.  Staying this close to him—the crystalline silence as they stare at each other, both wonderstruck or something like it, at how easy it was in practice to bridge the distance they’ve been dancing around all this goddamn time—

Roy strokes his thumb along Ed’s cheek and smiles in a way that makes his eyes crinkle up at the corners.  He is so, so, _so_ fucking gorgeous right now—and all the time—

He clears his throat.  “May I—”

Ed fists both hands in the front of his stupid waistcoat and yanks, and their mouths clash together, and that’s better than an answer anyway.

Roy tastes a little bit like smoke, or maybe that’s just the fight with the dragon talking.  Doesn’t much matter.  His mouth moves against Ed’s like a dream, like the _best_ dream—a deep, dark, fond one; the kind Ed wakes from hot and bothered and slightly embarrassed and sheepishly delighted.

Roy’s fingertips against his face make his skin tingle everywhere; Roy’s breath runs through him, and the gentle pressure of Roy’s tongue against his lips—and then against _his_ tongue, holy _hell_ —makes something in him tremble, wriggle, and turn to goo.

Romantic and shit.

It feels so damn good.  It feels better than he ever dared to hope for; better than he let himself wonder about; better than… chocolate.  Good God.

Roy draws away, grinning in that verge-of-a-laugh way he has that makes Ed’s stomach twirl and his eyes roll with equal vigor.

“Smug bastard,” Ed says, which very likely looks stupid when he can _feel_ that his mouth is wet with it, with kissing the fuck out of Roy Mustang, and it’s probably all red and swollen and shiny and fucking delectable-looking, if the recent changes to Roy’s are anything to go by.  Ed wants to kiss him again.  But first Ed wants to get his own damn head examined, and now that he’s looking way too damn intently at Roy—  “You’re shaking.”

“Well,” Roy says, “you are, as it turns out, devastatingly attractive in more senses of the phrase than I’d realized.”

Ed eyes him.  “That, or you’re suffering from a shit-ton of blood loss.”

Roy’s blithe smile speaks volumes.  Ed is slightly startled to notice how much he’s looking forward to reading them, cover to fucking cover.  “Perhaps it’s a bit of both.”

Ed eyes him harder and makes him wait.  He’d better get used to that.  He’d better get used to a lot of shit.

Then Ed holds up his left hand.  All of the gashes are gummed up with dirt and the early stages of scabbing, but he’s still got some blood left to spare.  Probably.  “If you—I mean, if you need… if it’d—help… I mean, we gotta get you back before the sun comes up, so—whatever it—takes.  Y’know.”

The way Roy gazes at him makes his stomach backflip, cartwheel, and then turn itself inside out.  He has never, in his _life_ , seen someone look so wordlessly _in-love_ before, and it—

It’s big.  It’s big, but it’s vulnerable, and Ed thinks of down feathers and glass sculptures and fragile little capillaries all at once.

“Only if you’re sure,” Roy says.

“I wouldn’t offer if I wasn’t,” Ed says.

Roy leans in, and something in Ed—something instinctive; something that wants very much to stay alive—balks and grabs a hold of his tongue.

“Wait,” he says, lifting the Hearthwood hand between them.  His heart’s doing funny acrobatic shit for a variety of reasons.  He really hopes Roy can’t hear it this close up.  “It’s not gonna—turn me into anything, is it?”

“Into a vampire, do you mean?” Roy asks, and his eyelids are low, and the edge of a glamor on it makes Ed’s joints melt at the same instant that his better judgment starts to growl.  “No, no—you have to taste _my_  blood for that.”  He grins, slow and bright and gorgeous and absolutely lethal; and then he winks, which is even worse.  “But I can’t promise it won’t turn you _on_  to anything, if you get my mea—”

“Bite me,” Ed says.  “Fuckin’ _literally_.”

“My indescribable pleasure,” Roy says, softly.

Ed takes a deep breath and then takes the plunge.  He tries to scrub some of the accumulated filth off of his left wrist as he raises it again.

“There’s a… more palatable way to do it,” Roy says, with a hint of mischief that makes Ed’s extremely tortured stomach put itself through a second obstacle course.

“You callin’ me dirty?” Ed asks.

“Perish the thought,” Roy says.  He pauses.  “Your—mouth.”

Ed eyes him.  Y’know, just for a change.  “What about it?”

Roy’s hand lifts; Ed’s body tightens everywhere in anticipation.  The pad of Roy’s thumb grazes across his bottom lip, light and slow and fucking tantalizing.

“There’s quite a lot of circulation in the mouth,” Roy says.

“Holy shit,” Ed says.

Roy smiles, and he tries to mask the emotion behind it, but the fact that he drops his hand gives him away.  “It’s not nece—”

“Shut up,” Ed says.  “Just—do it quick before I change my mind, okay?”

One of Roy’s eyebrows arches, but the quality of his smile has changed again, which means Ed’s on the right track.  “I’ve never known you to change your mind about anything.”

“And I’ve never known you to follow fucking instructions,” Ed says.  “I told you to shut up.  And t—”

Roy’s palm flattens itself along the side of his neck this time, fingertips resting right against his pulse, and then they’re kissing again—harder, deeper, _hotter_ ; Roy’s tongue flirts with his, and he fumbles for a grip on Roy’s shirt just to make sure he stays standing, because his knees suddenly aren’t on board with this whole upright thing.  The unholy things that man can do with just lips and tongue and the slightest hint of teeth—

But then it’s not a hint—it’s way more than a hint; it’s a sharp and immediate and startlingly fierce pain where Roy just bit into Ed’s bottom lip.

Impulse makes him jerk back against Roy’s grip, which only widens the wound, because he doesn’t get anywhere; he tastes the hot blood in his mouth for a second—

But then it… changes.  The sting fades into something much more like a hum, and then it starts tingling, and then it feels… nice?

And Roy’s sucking on his lip, and that _definitely_ feels nice, even though it probably should be weird; and the gentle tug of the suction and Roy’s mouth still sealed over his keep sending his guts through yet more complicated acrobatics.  He’s not entirely sure he remembers how to breathe—it seems like he’s still doing it, or something close enough to it to be supplying his brain with oxygen, but if he was called upon to describe the process of human respiration, he can’t guarantee that he’d know what to say.

Maybe Roy just has that effect on everyone.

The rhythmic pull of Roy drinking from his lip lulls him into an immensely bizarre sort of half-dream state.  He manages to cling to just enough presence of mind to curl his fist tighter into the front of Roy’s waistcoat—firstly, so that he won’t topple the hell over, either now or when Roy eventually lets go; secondly, to ground himself in reality so that the gorgeous, spine-trilling, skin-warming, heart-clutching power of Roy’s kiss doesn’t make him forget that he’s feeding a vampire right now.

He doesn’t even think to open his eyes until Roy starts drawing back.  He can’t tell at first whose heavy breathing he’s hearing; after a second, and several attempts to swallow, he realizes that they’re both panting more or less in unison.  He probes at the inside of his lip with the tip of his tongue, and there’s a tender spot, but it’s not bleeding.  His head’s swimmy—but just a little; just… like sitting up too fast first thing in the morning, right after you open your eyes.

Speaking of eyes—Roy’s are as deep and captivating as ever, but they’re… not as dark.

The irises are _red_.

Roy licks his lips and smiles—in that cautious, deliberate Roy-way that translates into something like hesitation.

“Sorry,” he says.  “Are you… all right?”

“’Course,” Ed says.  His hand’s still wrapped tight into Roy’s waistcoat; he disentangles it and tries to gesture without pointing like a child.  “Your eyes always do—that?”

“Ah,” Roy says, and there’s a touch of color in his cheeks—but not red.  _Purple_.  It makes sense, given the ichor and all, and it’s weird as all get-out, but strangely sort of… cute.  “I’m afraid so.  I know it’s a little disconcerting; if you’d rather n—”

“S’fine,” Ed says.  “Red’s my favorite color, y’know.”

Roy’s hand rises again—this time to tuck Ed’s hair behind his ear, so fucking tenderly that Ed thinks his heart might just quit once and for all.

“Is that so,” Roy says.

“Wouldn’t’ve said it if it wasn’t,” Ed says.

Roy’s eyelashes dip, and he leans in _again_ , and maybe Ed’s possessed, or something, because he can’t help pushing himself up onto his toes to shift up to meet Roy’s mouth—

“Would you two get a room?” Al says.

“I have one,” Ed says, freezing halfway.  “You live there.”

“ _Augh_ ,” Al says, which is about as much as an older brother can hope for in a situation like this.

“Maybe, um,” Ed manages, trying and failing to clear his throat.  “Maybe we should—go, though.  Y’know.  Gotta… get back before sunrise and everything.  And your house is completely trashed.”

Roy grimaces.  That shouldn’t be cute, either, but something about the fangs make it seem sort of catlike, and… 

“Right,” Roy says.  “Well—”

“You can stay with us,” Ed says.  “At least until you get it sorted out.”

“On the condition,” Al says, loudly, ruffling his significantly larger feathers, “that nothing… untoward… goes on… while I’m around.”

Ed rolls his eyes so hard his head hurts.

Roy, meanwhile, lays one hand over his heart and blinks.  “My goodness.  What do you take me for, Alphonse?”

“A vampire,” Al says.  “Who’s trying to get with my brother.”

Roy is trying not to grin, but the grin is winning.  “That’s… rather fair.”

“Oh, jeez,” Ed says.  He holds out the Hearthwood hand—a stupid old instinct, but now he’s committed; he can’t pull it back and offer the other one.  Maybe—just maybe—Roy won’t mind.  “Will you come the fuck on?”

Roy grabs on tight and laces their fingers together, like he hasn’t even noticed the difference.  Ed can’t quite feel it, which is a damn shame.

A damn shame, and a reason to do this a lot more often, with the other hand, perhaps.

“I would love to,” Roy says.

Ed shakes his head and starts back towards where they left the poor horse down by the front wall, towing Roy along after him.  Al, in the form of something very small and very swift, darts around his left foot, climbs his leg, scrambles up the front of his cloak, settles on his shoulder, and then shifts into a hawk.

They both glance back at Roy, who looks way too happy about all of this, considering the density of near-death experiences involved for all of them.  Maybe blood’s like booze for vampires.  Maybe he’s just relieved they all made it out.

Or maybe it’s… something else.  Maybe it’s something to look forward to.

Ed makes a face.

“Is something wrong?” Roy asks.

“No,” Ed says.  “Which is the thing that’s weird.”

Roy swings their joined hands, which makes the reduced remnants of blood in Ed’s body congregate instantly in his face.

“Good-weird?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Pretty good.”

“Gross,” Al says.

“And pretty gross,” Ed says.

“Perfect,” Roy says.

And it is.

Ed’s not sure if he’s going to be able to get used to that, but it seems like it’s worth a shot.


End file.
